BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



THE PATIENCE OF HOPE. 

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Present Heaven 



ADDRESSED TO A FRIEND 



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THE AUTHOR OF "THE PATIENCE OF HOPE" 



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ET TENEO ET TENEO 



BOSTON 

TICKNOR AND FIELDS 
1863 




f 

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The Library 
gp Congress 

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FIFTH EDITION. 



University Press: 

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" Think not the Faith by which the just shall live 
Is a dead creed, a map correct of Heaven, 
Far less a feeling fond and fugitive, 

A thoughtless gift withdrawn as soon as given ; 
It is an affirmation and an act 
That bids eternal truth be present fact.'''' 

Hartley Coleridge. 



<So3> 



Contents. 

PAGB 

I. Introduction . . . . . . i 

II. The Gospel received Partially . . 32 

III. The Gospel received Historically . . 57 

IV. The Gospel received Prophetically . 99 
V. The Gospel received Implicitly . .126 



Notes 155 




Introduction. 



'VERY man that cometh to God, 
darkly as he may feel after, and im- 
perfectly as he may find Him, comes 
to Him under the twofold conviction 
upon which the Apostle bases the existence of 
Faith itself; he must be persuaded "that God 
is, and that He is the rewarder of such as dili- 
gently seek Him," — a testimony which the 
Psalmist confirms even in transposing it, when 
he declares, " Verily there is a reward for the 
righteous, doubtless there is a God that judgeth 
the earth." Thus all approaches to the Supreme 
Being, howsoever warped by error or super- 
stition, possess something of the nature of true 
religion (re-allegiance), because they testify to 
man's belief in a power raised above humanity, 
yet still cognizant of its actions and influenced 
by its dispositions. And while the human spirit 
has proved itself unable without supernatural 

1 A 



2 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

help to " retain God " within it, while it has so 
often lost the object of faith, it has ever kept 
within it an instinct, witnessing to its capacity 
for access to the Divine, and reaching out after 
a bond that may place it in an assured mutual 
relation with that to which it aspires. Natural 
religion, and all that goes to make it up, prayer, 
propitiatory and deprecatory offerings, a life spent 
in accordance with what is believed to be the 
Divine pleasure, is the witness on man's part to 
his desire for reciprocal communion with that, 
which, though unseen, he feels to be above, 
around, within him. Revealed Religion is God's 
acknowledgment of this inward instinct, to which 
it restores its true object, and shows how that 
object may be alone apprehended. 

I, saith Christ Jesus, am the Way. Revela- 
tion is the coming forth of the Father to meet 
His Son, while He is a great way off; it is as the 
spirit of God moving upon the darkened surface 
of man's heart and intellect, and saying, " Let 
there be light." For no man hath yet by search- 
ing found out God ; no wish, no yearning of 
the human breast, however mighty, could have 
brought down Christ from above ; no effort, no 
agony of the human mind could (as some deem) 
have raised Him up from the depths of indi- 
vidual consciousness. Our God is one that 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 3 

hideth Himself. The field of grace is one with 
treasure hid within it, a treasure to which grace 
itself must guide us, or God, though indeed 
He is not far from any one of us, is among 
us as One whom we know not. We need a 
Divine science ; a knowledge, as regards spirit- 
ual things, to be attained only by the aid of an 
Appointed Interpreter, Revelation, standing be- 
tween the human soul and God, just as natural 
science stands between man and nature, enabling 
him to understand, to enjoy, yea, to overcome, 
that which without this blessed intervention 
would have remained a barren mystery. 

Through Science, which is but, to speak 
plainly, a familiar acquaintance with the things 
which immediately surround us, man, in ma- 
terial things, has not so much made as found 
himself rich ; year after year he goes on enrich- 
ing himself more amply with the * blessings of 
Earth's breast, the fair and fruitful surface, and 
with the blessings of her womb, the precious 
things shut within the ancient mountains, and 
hidden within the lasting hills. And yet, while 
the aspect of social life is changed, and its com- 
forts and resources increased a thousand-fold, all 
things, none the less, continue as, in the words 
of Scripture, " they have been from the begin- 

* Gen. xlix. 25. 



4 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

ning " ; no fresh blood has been poured within 
our outward system, no new energies, no super* 
added forces, are at work within it ; the secret 
of the change is a simple one, — while Nature 
has remained the same, man has learnt to know 
her better. Silence has been broken up, and 
separation. He has begun to question this mute 
companion, dumb, it was supposed, from her 
birth, and has received for answer a world, 
growing wider and richer with every year that 
rolls. 

And when I consider this, and remember that 
our Father, unlike the patriarchal one, has more 
than one blessing for His children ; when I begin 
to compare His two great kingdoms with each 
other, and remember that in each we have a 
goodly heritage, in each a Friend, the Steward 
and Dispenser of God's mysteries, rich in knowl- 
edge, in wisdom, and in counsel, I long that we, 
and all with whom we are joint possessors and 
inheritors, should set ourselves to inquire into 
the secrets of grace as diligently as our age is 
penetrating into those of nature. These, it is 
true, are not to be won, like material acquisitions, 
by mere 'effort and labor, yet it was a wise man 
who told us, that " labor was profitable for all 
things" And in this great spiritual aim, the 
work, as the Apostle emphatically expresses it, 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 5 

of our salvation, I often think we lose much, by- 
pursuing it after vague and fanciful processes of 
our own devising, rather than by a diligent ap- 
plication of the method provided for us by God 
Himself. Like professed treasure-seekers, we 
search about under the guidance of some dream 
or impulse, instead of seeking for our wealth 
where God has placed it, in the natural riches of 
the soil. And in this region it is our own fault if 
we proceed uncertainly. God has been pleased 
to leave us, as it were, to guess at the economy 
of His outward Providence ; through patient in- 
vestigation, experiment, and inference, we have 
to wring out Nature's secrets from her apparently 
reluctant grasp, but it is far otherwise with His 
revealed economy of grace. Here we are no 
longer workers in the dark, who must compare 
and question, examining every step as we go 
along, and asking of it with anxiety, " Whither 
will this conduct us?" 

The very idea of a Revelation precludes, on 
the part of those who accept it as such, the 
possibility of uncertainty or hesitation ; for if we 
believe the Gospel to be indeed from God, we 
find all that it demands of us, whether by way 
of fact or precept, lying within the compass of 
two grand yet simple words, — Acceptance and 
Obedience. We must accept the Gospel, inas- 



6 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

much as it makes us aware of all that the 
Almighty is to us ; we must obey it, inasmuch 
as it declares to us all that He would have us to 
be to Him. 

This seems a very simple, even obvious posi- 
tion, but if granted, it leads on to a question of 
vital interest. Is the Gospel of Redemption 
thus accepted among us, not simply believed as 
a fact, but believed in as a power, an efficacy, a 
virtue? received not merely as a standard for 
doctrine and a rule of conduct, but as that which 
it declares itself to be, a principle having " life 
in itself," and the ability to impart the life which 
it possesses ? Let us a little consider the Gospel 
under what may be termed its sacramental char- 
acter, as being the means by which the life that 
is in Christ is conveyed within the soul. To 
the faithful receiver the outward letter of Scrip- 
ture is but the sheath or vehicle of the incor- 
ruptible " Word," by which, as the Apostle tes- 
tifies,* we are born again unto God. To receive 
it, therefore, simply as a revelation of God's will, 
a record of His dealings, a book of laws and 
statutes and commands, is much the same thing 
as if, living in the days when He of whom it 
testifies dwelt among us in the flesh, we had 
received Him as Moses or Elias, or as one of the 

* 1 Peter i. 23. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 7 

prophets, a Teacher sent from God to declare 
unto men His will. The reception which en- 
dues " with power to become the sons of God," 
is that which recognizes a higher mission, which 
is able to discern that the Gospel of Salvation, 
in placing the human soul in union with its 
Maker and Redeemer and Sanctifier, supplies 
in this union the spring of action, while it pro- 
claims, as did the Law, its appointed rule. What 
we need here is a wise simplicity, a childlike 
literal spirit, loving and bold enough to take 
God at His own word, and to appropriate Him 
in all for which that word is our warrant ; but 
instead of lifting up our gates, and setting the 
doors of our souls more wide that this King of 
Glory may come in, instead of expanding to 
meet the breadth and fulness of the Gospel, we 
show a disposition rather to contract it to fit our 
own narrow standard. Then,* because we bring 
no more vessels to hold it, the oil of Divine 
grace is stayed. But we seem in general so 
little conscious of this, our imperfect reception 
of the truths upon which our salvation rests, 
that, even in most deeply deploring our defi- 
ciencies towards God, we fail to appreciate their 
true origin, and make a subject of regretful 
wonder of what a more correct estimate of our 

* St. Augustine. 



8 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

revealed relations with the Almighty would 
place in the light of a simple necessity. We 
urge this question upon others in the way . of 
remonstrance, upon ourselves in the way of self- 
condemnation ; the preacher asks of his people, 
the Christian of his heart, Why does the gen- 
eral standard of our practice fall so far below 
the mark of our high calling, as set before us 
in Scripture ? 

And to this there comes one answer, sorrow- 
ful and self-upbraiding, — " We fail because we 
do not obey the Gospel"; while there remains 
a far truer, far deeper witness and accusation 
written up against us, — that we could see 
how plainly ! — " We fail because we do not 
believe it." "I believed," said the Psalmist, 
"and therefore have I spoken"; because we 
believe, and according to the measure, strength, 
and fulness of our belief, will we, as Christians, 
speak and act and live. As " the stream can 
ascend no higher than its fountain," so it is in 
vain to try to live up to the Gospel until we 
(to speak familiarly) believe up to it. And this 
brings me to the question I have been so long 
anxious to consider, Do we — I speak of those 
who are Christians in more than in name and 
outward profession — so believe it ? Do we 
even know enough of its Divine nature and 



A PRESENT HE A VEN. 9 

efficacy to see that each one of the complaints 
so commonly heard among us, whether of pov- 
erty, of weakness, of incapacity to serve and 
love our Father who is in Heaven, is at the 
same time a confession of unbelief in that Gos- 
pel in which God has been pleased to make 
Himself our own ? For in the things which 
concern salvation, to believe is to have. Faith 
is not only a spiritual insight, but a realizing 
appropriating faculty, through which God, and 
with Him, in the words of the Apostle, " all 
things, become ours"; for all that God is in 
Himself, righteousness and wisdom and strength, 
He becomes unto us through Faith. Accept- 
ance of the Gospel, that is, of the exceeding 
great and precious promises through which we 
become partakers of the Divine Nature, places 
us in direct union with God, — the strength, 
fulness, and intimacy of this union is maintained 
by faith, and must exist in exact proportion to 
its measure ; and thus, in the words of Scrip- 
ture, all things become possible to those that 
believe, through the power of Him to whom 
belief unites them. Yet that we have still 
much to learn in this matter is betrayed by 
another sentiment, often heard among us under 
variously modified forms of expression. " Why," 
it is asked, " so much anxiety about points of 



10 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

doctrine, when it is the devotion of the heart 
and the practice of the life upon which God 
has made salvation to depend ? It is these 
which constitute the Christian." y 

" The tree is known by its fruits " ; most 
truly so, — but it depends for the maintenance 
of those fruits, yea, even for its own existence, 
upon its* root in the soil beneath. The Chris- 
tian life is judged of (and this with the strictest 
propriety) by that part of it which is seen, but 
it depends upon the part of it which is unseen 
for the hold which it takes and keeps upon 
God ; and to look for works, or the blossoming 
and expansion of God within the life, without 
Faith, by means of which the soul is rooted and 
grounded in Him, is as little rational, that is, as 
little in accordance with things in their true 
relation to each other, as it would be to look 
in any simply natural operation for an effect 
detached from its producing cause. Faith is 

* It is interesting, by way of illustration, to compare what 
Lord Bacon tells us of natural growth, " that every vegetable 
swells and throws out its constituent parts towards the circum- 
ference, both upwards and downwards, and there is no difference 
between the roots and branches, except that the root is buried 
in the earth, and the branches are exposed to the air and sun," 
(Novum Organum, book ii.,) with what Baxter says of progress 
in spiritual life, " I know that every man must grow as trees do, 
downwards and upwards at once, and that the roots increase as the 
bulk and branches do." 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 11 

the Law, upon whose actuating energy God 
has made the life which we have in Him to 
depend ; and we can no more detach what we 
do in our lives from what we are in our souls, 
than we can separate heat or light from their 
essential principles, or expect to enjoy either in 
the absence of the conditions in which their 
existence is involved. The disciples showed 
they were aware of this by that remarkable 
answer, when enjoined by their Master to the 
practice of forgiveness, " Lord, increase our 
faith" ; we might have expected, when a moral 
duty difficult to the natural man was in ques- 
tion, the words w r ould have been " increase our 
charity"; but in the conviction that obedience 
was only practicable through a strength and 
virtue that did not reside in themselves, their 
prayer was for an increase of the faculty through 
which alone the Divine aid can be made availa- 
ble by the soul, and effectual to the supplying 
of all its wants. We also confess that all our 
sufficiency is of God, that without Him it is 
impossible to please Him. I long, therefore, 
to see Christians, in a deep realization of this 
acknowledged dependence, begin to take up the 
Gospel under its true and living aspect, as the 
means whereby our Creator has been pleased 
to impart, not advice and instruction only, but 



12 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

Himself unto His creatures ; and before we 
can do this, we have need to look a little more 
closely into what Doddridge calls the God-ward 
side of our covenant. 

I think we lose much, from beginning, as you 
express it in one of your letters, our religion at 
the wrong end, concerning ourselves first, and 
principally, with the idea of what we are or 
ought to be to God, without sufficiently con- 
sidering the converse, what He is to us. " Ac- 
quaint thyself," saith one of old, " with God, 
and be at peace"; and the Apostle, speaking 
by the same Spirit, tells of a Knowledge through 
which grace and peace are multiplied. Yet how 
little careful are we to attain to this knowledge, 
how little zealous to advance in it, how little, 
judging from the modes in which we are accus- 
tomed to express ourselves, do we, even in a 
speculative sense, know about the work of our 
redemption and sanctification, those great things 
which God has done for us already, wherein it 
becomes us to rejoice ! 

How few among us, with the beloved Apos- 
tle* and his faithful and accepted converts, seem 
to be persuaded of the love and good-will that 
God hath to us, His children, reconciled in 
Christ ! Even our best books and preachers 

* 1 John iv. 16. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 13 

dwell so little upon the glad tidings * in their 
fulness, that I feel justified in asserting that a 
Christian speaking among Christians can scarcely 
employ the language which Scripture authorizes 
the Redeemed of the Lord to use, or express an 
interest in the hopes which it has made the 
heritage of every sincere believer, without ap- 
pearing to set forth some strange thing. If he 
should venture to speak of a reconciled Father, 
a living Saviour, an actual Sanctifier, a present 
Heaven, and to speak of all these as being his 
own, it will be at the risk of being set down by 
his hearers as enthusiastic, possibly as presump- 
tuous ; and this, because the grounds of his 
confidence will be in so far mistaken that he 
will be supposed to be resting upon some par- 
ticular claim to God's favor as an individual, 
instead of simply asserting his title to that its 
manifest declaration, in which all his brethren 
share. Yet he boasts of no more direct assur- 
ance of pardon than that for which Scripture 
gives him warrant in the revelation of a Sav- 
iour's death ; he asks for no sign or token of 
personal acceptance, having in this matter no 
other anxiety than to secure his interest in the 
already given manifestation of His Father's 
love, the Christ, who is, if they will so have it, 
both " His and theirs." 

* Note A. 



14 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

As Englishmen and Protestants we love our 
Bibles, we are zealous for them, if not always 
with a zeal according to knowledge, — also jeal- 
ous for them, inclined to resent every attempt 
to restrict the circulation of Scripture, or to 
explain away its peculiarities ; so that I dare 
the more strongly take up my protest against 
an unauthorized yet generally current version, 
passed about among us from lip to lip, without 
question or challenge, than which I dare ven- 
ture to assert no published version of Scripture, 
however mutilated and imperfect, ever fell so 
lamentably short of the original. It is in the 
very nature of error to be at once vague and 
subtle ; to insinuate, and, as it were, incorporate 
itself wherever it can find entrance, yet all the 
while to assume no tangible form wherein it 
may be detected. Therefore I would that it 
were possible to arrest, and, so to speak, con- 
dense this pseudo-Gospel ; to bid it stand side 
by side with the true one, that we may see 
what a shrunken, diminished thing it looks, 
and learn how far, in favor of these cisterns 
of our own which can hold no water, we have 
departed from those living fountains, the lively 
oracles of God. 

We have fallen, as a people, into a low and 
limited view of God's inner dispensation of 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 15 

grace, akin, little as we may ourselves suspect 
it, to the Rationalistic interpretation of His 
outward polity. God's Word in the one case, 
as God's work in the other, is toned down and 
diluted until few of its distinctive and essential 
features remain. There is a practical as well as 
a speculative unbelief, and it is this which we 
have suffered to creep over us. In ordinary 
society — I speak boldly, and yet I hope with- 
out offence — there are few who deny the Gos- 
pel to be true, perhaps fewer still who believe it 
to be efficient. To explain myself further, — 
we confess the Gospel to be from God, we give 
in our adhesion to the facts that it records, but 
when we come to the effectual working of this 
Gospel, to the actual living consequences of 
those recorded facts, there is an evident stop- 
ping short, a "limiting" of God akin to that 
of the Israelites,* and arising from the self-same 
source, a dulness and slowness of heart to be- 
lieve the great things which He has done for 
our souls, and is even now doing in them. And 
while I am writing these words, slowness of 
heart, I am reminded that it may be advisable to 
point out the distinction between what I am 
now contending for, the simple recognition of 
Gospel truth, and its spiritual reception, which 

* Ps. lxxviii. 41. 



16 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

is in itself salvation. This last claims the con- 
sent of the heart as well as of the intellect, and, 
like all things born, brought up, and nourished * 
there, it does not develop its full strength and 
perfection in a moment ; we may follow our 
Lord for years, and find, as the disciples did, 
that He has still " many things " left to tell us, 
for these things of God are notf taken and 
shown to us by Him who has received that 
office, all at once ; yea, even in the end we 
shall discover that to understand this Gospel in 
its breadth and depth and height and fulness, 
is at the same time to appreciate that which 
the Apostle tells us passes our present knowl- 
edge, — the Love which ascended up on high 
and brought down this gift for us men that the 
Lord our God might dwell among us. To see 
God as He is, is the satisfying portion of the 
blessed in heaven, and this, to know Him as He 
is, is the privilege of the faithful upon earth, — 
one to be attained only through that " unction 
from the Holy One by which we understand all 
things," — a Divine intuition, imparted in most 
cases slowly, and in all, I think, gradually. 

Therefore you will perceive that what I am 
now saying to myself and others, is not so much 
"let us know these things," as "let us learn 

* Note B. | John xvi. 15. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 17 

them." If we would be " taught of God," let 
us place ourselves under the tutelage He has 
appointed. The Spirit speaks unto us by the 
Word ; faith comes by hearing. It is precisely 
this hearing, which, according to what I shall 
venture to call a common-sense view of our 
religion, I now claim for the Gospel. I demand 
for it, as I might do in behalf of any merely 
natural system, that it should be allowed to 
speak for itself, and accepted (if accepted at all) 
as that which it is self-declared to be. All that 
I would say is this, if God has spoken to man, it 
must be to some clear and evident purpose, and 
in a way to render that purpose availing. His 
speaking must be, not in word only, but in 
power. Let us see, then, that we turn not in 
any wise away from Him that speaketh. If this 
message be indeed from our Father, our part as 
wise and obedient children is a simple one, — to 
believe what He says, to take what He gives, — 
simple, but who shall say that it is easy ! Hard, 
rather, through its very simplicity, to man's 
erring spirit, prompt ever to limit, to transfer, 
and modify the plainest statement of Scripture, 
eager to behold, eager even to endure, some 
great thing, solicitous to ask, What shall we 
do to work the works of God? forgetful of 
that full and final answer, This is the work 

B 



18 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath 
sent. 

Yet except we become as little children, we 
-shall in no case enter the Kingdom of Heaven, 
and it is in a spirit emulous of that which in 
childhood receives so much, because it receives so 
literally, that I would fain approach some of the 
traditions most generally received among us, 
and compare them with that Gospel of everlast- 
ing Truth which, in such measure as they obtain 
ground, they go far to render of none effect. 

But before I quit this introductory view of my 
subject, a sense of its unspeakable importance 
impels me to linger yet awhile upon the thresh- 
old, and to repeat my intimate conviction that 
we shall find, so we do but pierce deep enough, 
that inward decay and outward disorder — all 
things which, whether in the heart or in the 
community, spring up to trouble and defile — 
hold by one common root, — Unbelief in God's 
Word and in His Work. There is a breaking in 
and a going out among us, only to be remedied 
by our taking up our true position, — that of a 
people who have the Lord for their God ; and 
to this end we must, in the words of the hun- 
dredth Psalm, be sure that the Lord He is God, 
and be or make ourselves equally sure that 
we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 19 

of His hand. We must, now that the Patri- 
arch's dream has become the Christian's reality, 
set our feet firmly upon this the lowest round 
of the golden ladder that reaches even unto 
Heaven. We must take the first step, first. 
There is a significance in the very placing of 
these clauses of the petition our Lord left us, 
" Thy kingdom come ; Thy will be done." 
God's kingdom must be established within the 
soul before His Will can be fulfilled in the life ; 
and it is from our imperfect realization of this 
truth that so many are weak and sickly among 
us, and so many sleep the sleep of Formalism, 
that brother of spiritual Death, from which it is 
scarcely to be distinguished. We mourn over a 
Christianity as far degenerated from its primi- 
tive Type, " the tree planted by the rivers of 
waters," as if it had been (as in Chinese gar- 
dening) dwarfed and dwindled of set purpose, 
without seeming aware of the presence of the 
cold underlying subsoil through which this result 
has bqen effected. Yet to lament over defi- 
ciency and decay is at the same time to ac- 
knowledge that such is in great part voluntary ; 
it is to confess that we have cut ourselves off 
from Him, the source and spring of life and 
fulness, who has provided for the abundant* 
watering of His garden. 

* Eccl"" xxiv. 31. 



20 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

God, in revealing Himself to us in His Son, 
in communicating Himself to us through His 
Spirit, has placed us in a wide and wealthy- 
place ; in this land there is no straitness, neither 
scarceness ; here we may eat bread and drink 
water to the full, and find honey even in the 
stony rock of tribulation. Why are we then a 
feeble people, — feeble though numerous ? ready 
to exclaim, when we read of those who have 
gone before us in God's faith and fear, " There 
were giants in the land in those days " ; instead 
of asking why those days should in any respect 
be different from these present ones, when God, 
now as then the Strength of His people, remains 
the same and changes not. If He has in any 
degree ceased to work mighty works in and for 
us, must not this cessation arise from that which 
of old restrained Him ? Because of unbelief, 
" He did not there many mighty works " ; nay, 
one Gospel, going further, emphatically declares 
that He could not, " because of unbelief." And 
if the arm of the Lord be not more openly 
revealed among us, may it not be because His 
report, God's own report of His own dealings, 
has not been believed ? Instead of lamenting 
our degeneracy from God's saints and chosen 
ones under either Covenant, let us rather ex- 
amine ourselves to see whether we are really in 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 21 

that Faith which was once delivered to them, 
and through which they, out of weakness being 
made strong, " obtained promises," and wrought 
the marvels recorded of them. These were 
men of like passions and infirmities with our- 
selves, only differing from us according to the 
measure and proportion of their faith. They 
lived under no clearer dispensation, they en- 
joyed no fuller privileges, than are and must 
remain our own, so long as that Word endures, 
" Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
of the world" ; and there is, therefore, no need, 
whatever we of ourselves may choose to im- 
agine, that we should come behind them in any 
spiritual grace or gift. To do the first Works, 
we have but to return to the first Love, we have 
but to seek the first Faith ; and to this end we 
must lay to our souls this counsel given by the 
Spirit to a Church that, declining in belief, 
had declined in strength and energy, " Re- 
member, therefore, how thou hast received and 
heard." 

The Covenant, like the commandment, is 
"exceeding broad"; close and intimate, wide 
and reaching even unto Heaven, are the rela- 
tions in which it binds man with his Maker 
and Redeemer, yet it enters not into man's un- 
renewed heart to receive the things which God 



22 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

hath prepared for them that love Him. So that 
believers have need to say with Achsa, " Thou 
hast given me a south land, give me also springs 
of water." God is not the author of confusion, 
yet over how many of our thoughts about 
Him — alike over our ideas of what He is to us, 
and what He would have us be to Him — does 
confusion still reign ! Viewing the Gospel un- 
der its perceptive aspect, our popular theory 
appears to set the character, which it is its object 
to mould, before us, just as a work of confess- 
edly unapproachable excellence is placed before 
a youthful artist. It is a magnificent outline, 
an admirable ideal, which our Master has set 
before us to contemplate, but the excellence of 
which He never expects us to attain. This, 
indeed, is an acknowledged impossibility; we 
must do as well as we can, but need not even 
aim at a close resemblance. So much for our 
work ; in that which we are to be towards God, 
He does not, it seems, mean us to be that which 
He tells us to be. And even thus with our Faith ; 
in that which God is to us, we are not to ex- 
pect Him to be that which He has promised to be. 
We are to believe in the Promise, God's Word, 
otherwise we shall not be Christians ; but we 
are not to look for its performance, the Work 
that He doeth upon earth, or we shall be en- 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 23 

thusiasts, expecting what we shall never meet 
with. What does this mean? Even that we 
think our God to be altogether such a one as we 
are ourselves, — asking for what He does not 
expect to receive, promising what He does not 
intend to bestow ; yet 

" His sorrows were in earnest : no vain proffer 
Thou madest there, no superficial offer." 

The reality of what God has done for us 
while we were yet unreconciled may surely be 
our warrant for the reality of what He will do 
for us now that reconciliation has been effected. 
The love that was manifested in Him that died 
for our sins, is exerted in Him that even now 
liveth for our justification. Christ is the same, 
whether His love be shown in dying for us or 
in living for us ; it is but one Spirit under a 
different administration. " Reach hither," then, 
He may still say to many a cold and doubting 
Disciple, " thy finger, and behold my hands ; 
and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my 
side ; and be not faithless, but believing." 

The Christian name and profession is, to a 
mere professor, something which he carries about 
with him, because he does not know what else 
to make of it. Perhaps at some future time he 
means to make good these title-deeds, to claim 
the citizenship they confer ; at any rate, they 



24 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 



may He beside him dormant. He leaves them 
alone for the present. But there is many a 
sincere Christian among us whose position is far 
more trying and inconsistent, for to him this 
Holy Name and Profession is not a change of 
goodly raiment, laid by because unsuited to his 
actual wear : he is bidden to the wedding ; he 
is called to the battle ; he knows that garments 
are provided for the guests, armor for the 
soldiers ; yet in this there is less satisfaction 
than might have been expected. He does not 
move about in his new apparel with ease and 
freedom ; he asks himself if it was made for 
Mm ; he knows that he does not fill his armor ; 
he will not let go his sword, but he does not 
wield it freely; even his wealth embarrasses 
him; for while he is haunted by an uneasy 
consciousness of its responsibilities, he is little 
soothed by the actual reality of its enjoyment. 
It is hard to discover what degree of value 
Christians attach to those general privileges of 
their position which the Apostles place before us 
in so broad and diffused a light. What is it 
that we understand by being " in Christ " ? and 
in how much are we the gainers by being born 
into a world which He died to redeem, and 
being baptized into a Church which He lives to 
sanctify ? What precise benefit do we expect to 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 25 

receive from the ordinances* which God has 
appointed for us to walk in ? What advantage, 
in short, is there in being a Christian ? Is our 
Lord to be among us only as a mighty man that 
cannot save? I sometimes suspect that much 
of our feebleness of spirit may be traced to a 
secret reservation of the heart. We are not 
minded to serve God with our whole hearts, 

* I will particularly instance that of prayer, because it is the 
one in the practice of which Christians are the most constant, 
while they appear the least certain as to its benefits. On this 
point every, shade of opinion seems to prevail among us; and 
amongst these one whose tendency, seldom very clearly ex- 
pressed, is to place the advantage of prayer in the effect which 
it works upon our own minds, by drawing out our souls to God, 
and bringing them into a devout recollection of His presence. 
This benefit, which meditation would equally confer, is undoubt- 
edly one of the indirect advantages of prayer; but to place it as 
the prominent one is to fall far short of the Scriptural idea of 
that communion, through which we make our requests known 
to the God who tells that He will both hear and help those who 
faithfully call upon Him, — the God whom the Psalmist thus ad- 
dresses: " thou that hearest prayer." To believe in prayer is, 
in St. John's words, to have a confidence that, if we ask anything 
according to His will, He heareth us, — a confidence which cannot 
extend its fulness to our petitions for such blessings as are mere- 
ly temporal ; for in these prayers, sanctioned as they are by our 
Heavenly Father, we cannot be sure that the things we ask for 
are according to His will, which, in the disposition of earthly af- 
fairs, he has not made known to us; but we may rest in this con- 
fidence most fully in our requests for spiritual blessings, for on 
these points God's will has been revealed ; and we know that, in 
seeking and coveting all such things, we are only asking for what 
He wishes to give us, seeking, not to have our own pleasure, but to 
do His. " And this is the Will of God, even your sanctification.' , 
2 



26 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

and therefore dare not look to Him to bless and 
help us in our whole lives. We seem to look 
upon His promises as things reserved either for 
extraordinary Christians, or for ordinary ones, 
perhaps, upon extraordinary occasions, — for sea- 
sons of imminent distress and difficulty, — those 
great water-floods in which we all, as if in- 
stinctively, turn to God as to a place to flee 
unto. Yet show me the Christian who believes 
in and lives by every word which comes out of 
the mouth of God, who expects to be answered 
in his prayers, to be aided in his deeds, to be 
strengthened in his conflicts, by the Saviour in 
whom his person is accepted ; who, in the sim- 
plest affair of every-day life, does God's bidding, 
because in His Word He has so commanded 
it, and expects His help, because in the same 
Word He has promised it ; and I will show you 
one, like St. Stephen, full of faith and of 
power, — a Christian man or woman, who, in 
Christ, is and has all things. 

We have been told by the greatest of practical 
thinkers, that " it is impossible to advance surely 
in any course, where the goal is not properly 
fixed." Until we set a definite, and, I may also 
add, an attainable object before us, as the end 
to which our endeavors are directed, there can 
be no steady, satisfactory progress ; we are but 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 27 

spending our strength in vain, and drawing our 
bow at a venture. Now, I think, in our re- 
ligious course we should employ all the appointed 
means of grace more steadily, if we set their end 
more clearly before us ; if we were fully per- 
suaded as to the object we are looking for, living 
for, — if we knew exactly what we expected the 
Gospel to do for us. 

We expect it, of course, to save us; but 
when, — in this world or in the future one ? to 
save us, but from what, — our sins, or only 
from the punishment denounced against them ? 
What is it that we mean by this word, so often 
upon our lips, Salvation ? Does it comprehend 
all that can make either this world or the next 
one desirable, in the restoration to God's favor, 
and the recovery of our lost birthright of happi- 
ness in Him ; or is our idea of it restricted to 
that " escaping from Hell and going to Heaven," 
to which it has been so truly said * the mere 
ordinary notion of it is limited? I will not 
dwell upon the low and servile character with 
which thoughts such as these invest an estate 
whose essential attribute is liberty ; I will but 
ask the followers of Him whose name was 
called Jesus, that He might save His people 
from their iniquities, if they hate sin because 

* Wesley. 



28 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

their God hates it, or only because He punishes 
it ? Is it from the accursed thing itself, or only 
from the consequences of its being found upon 
them, that they pray and strive to be delivered ? 
I will not dwell upon the unw T orthiness of such 
views. I would only point out their insuffi- 
ciency. It will go hard with us in the Battle 
that is sore against us, if we are to find our foes 
in the present, and only to look for our friends 
in the future. The Devil occupies a visible 
kingdom, the World holds an open market, the 
flesh wages an ever-present warfare ; and is not 
the Salvation which cometh from the Lord that 
which shall, yea, which doth, deliver us from all 
of these, a real work, a present work, a con- 
scious work, a far more complete and glorious 
work, than hands which hang down are able to 
embrace, and eyes looking two ways are able to 
behold ? Does not God's Covenant, when read 
by its own light, disclose itself as a Covenant, 
even in this present time, of life and peace ? 
If any of us have not yet found it to be so, it 
is because in this great matter we have yet 
much to learn of God, both in His Word and 
in His Work. To the Law, saith the Prophet, 
and to the Testimony. If they speak not ac- 
cording to this word, if the personal experience 
of believers does not agree w T ith the outward 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 29 

revelation they live under, it is because they 
have no light in them. 

We have been considering Religion as a Di- 
vine science ; it is not like the earthly ones in 
this, that there is no royal road into its myste- 
ries : none may penetrate into these who have 
not placed themselves under devout and diligent 
subjection to its laws, — but will not the high- 
way of simple obedience, in which our King 
Himself was content to travel, lead us on step 
by step, until we enter into the possession of 
secrets which make all outward requirements 
easy? " Mysteries are revealed unto the meek." 
Is there not such a thing as the gradual growth 
of an affection, which, by placing the heart's 
deliberate desire and preference and choice in 
God, induces a conformity to His will in all 
things, and makes His every command to be 
obeyed, not from the pressure of an enforced 
law, but through the unfolding of an inward 
principle ? Is there not a state in which those 
who are in Christ attain to that realization of 
their privileges which St. Paul desired for his 
Galatian converts, those little children for whom, 
although they were already born unto God, he 
travailed in birth again, until the Son, of whose 
Spirit they had received, was " formed in them," 
— until the mind w r hich was in them was also 



30 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

the mind which was in Christ Jesus, — until 
they were complete in Him, in attainments as 
well as in privileges? 

We are told that God loveth a cheerful giver : 
it is His own blessed characteristic to give boun- 
tifully, upbraiding not ; may we not, therefore, 
believe that He is favorable to the free and 
willing receiver of His goodness ? Yet, as the 
Israelites were slow to enter upon the Promised 
Land, so are we slow to enter upon the Pur- 
chased one ; we do not " eat the good " of the 
land which has been bestowed upon us in Christ, 
and through an evil, if unsuspected, heart of 
unbelief, a secret distrust in God's loving-kind- 
ness, we fall short, as they did, of the rest 
which even here He has provided for His peo- 
ple, — a rest, for the want of which no Pisgah 
view can altogether console us. Too many 
among us are like the spies,* we confess that 
it is a good land, but exaggerate the difficulties 
of attaining it ; its old dwellers (the deeply- 
seated infirmities of the flesh) seem too strong 
to be overcome : but as Caleb and Joshua said, 
and for this were so singularly blessed by God, 
" Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are 
well able to overcome it ; the Lord is with us." 
How long, asks Joshua, are ye slack to possess 

* Num. xiii. 14. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 



31 



the land which the Lord hath given you ? In 
these very words may Faith now urge, admon- 
ish, and encourage us to enter upon far richer 
blessings, far ampler privileges, — even those 
laid up for us in Christ. And if we, conscious 
of our inherent feebleness, should ask, " By 
whom shall Jacob go up, for he is but small ? " 
we have our answer given us, — 

" Not by Might nor by Power, but by my 
Spirit, said the Lord." 

"I will therefore look to the Lord, who hideth his face 
From the house of Jacob ; yet will 1 look to Him ; 
Should not a people seek their God, 
Should they seek instead of the living to the Dead? 
Unto the command and unto the testimony let them seek. 
If they will not speak according to this word, 
In which there is no obscurity, 

Every one of them shall pass through the land distressed and 
famished." 



II. 



THE GOSPEL RECEIVED PARTIALLY. 




" Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see 
the glory of God?" 

[ N assuming unbelief to be the ground- 
work of practical disobedience, I do 
not mean to ignore the presence and 
the power of those other opposing 
forces, — the enmity of the natural will, the 
attractions of the outward world, to which the 
transgression of God's law is so often attributed 
by the sacred writers ; I would only point out 
that 'these are but secondary causes, merely 
symptomatic in their nature, and witnessing to 
that which lies beneath them all, " a departing 
from the living God," to which all these other 
departures may be traced back. Over the soul 
which believes in God the attractive hold of 
outward sense is loosened, as in the soul which 
through belief has received Him within itself 



A PHESENT HEAVEN. 33 

the resistance of inward enmity is overcome. 
" The beginning of Faith," saith the Apocry- 
pha, yet herein a true Scripture, " is the cleav- 
ing unto God," * and it is only through failure 
in this steadfast cleaving that the foes, who 
from without or within war against the soul, 
are enabled to prevail against it ; without the 
footing which unbelief gives, they who hate us, 
though they may indeed assault us and afflict, 
can never become lords over us. In the soul 
which Faith has rooted and established in God, 
the enemy asks as vainly as did Archimedes of 
this earthly globe, for " a point " wherefrom to 
remove it from its steadfastness ; so long as it 
believes, it remains, with Him unto whom be- 
lief unites it, " anions the things which cannot 
be shaken,'' — fixed, like the limpet, upon the 
Rock of Ages. 

There is an attractive power of the world, a 
seductive weakness of the flesh, a deep-seated 
malignity of the Devil, working through each of 
these to our ruin. The world has something to 
show, the flesh something to crave, the Devil 
something to give, and more to promise ; these 
are all strong men armed, having mouths speak- 
ing, asking, boasting great things, and to all of 
these, their allurements, solicitations, and temp- 

* Ecclus. xxv. 12. 
2* C 



34 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

tations, the coming in of Him who is stronger 
than they has but one thing to oppose, a weapon, 
single, yet mighty and effectual to the pulling 
down of all their strongholds, — Faith, intimate, 
adhesive, and reliant in an ever-living and ever- 
present God. Baal's prophets are and have 
always been many, but this one prophet and 
witness of the Lord, even though, like Elijah, 
it remain alone, is strong enough to withstand 
and to overcome them all ; for this is the Vic- 
tory which overcometh the World, the world 
of sense without, the world of sin within us, 
even our Faith in Him who hath overcome all 
things for and in His people. The world is so 
much to us, only because God is so little ; let 
Faith but once restore the soul to its true centre, 
so that, looking at Divine realities from a just 
medium, it may see them in their true and 
unspeakable importance, and the power of out- 
ward things is weakened, and their overween- 
ing charm dissolved, — the enchanter's wand is 
broken, and his spell read backward. 

We have all, I think, felt it to be thus with 
us in moments of peculiar emergency, when 
some one overwhelming idea, whether it might 
be of God, of judgment, or of eternity, with its 
accompanying pressure of self-conscious moral 
responsibility, has been flashed out upon the 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 35 

soul in awful distinctness, as we sometimes see 
objects thrown into ghastly relief from the very 
blackness of the thunder-cloud behind them : at 
such moments the things we have most prized 
and cluno; to seem so insignificant that we can 
only confess and wonder at the delusion through 
which they have ever appeared of value. That 
impressions of this intense nature should be 
abiding would neither accord with the nature 
of true Faith, nor with the performance of the 
work which God has given it to do. Yet to 
have been their subject even for a moment is to 
be convinced that where these aw T ful, and as yet 
unseen, realities are felt and appreciated in their 
true prominence, and realized in their actual 
relation to ourselves, all meaner things will sink 
into a lower position. The shadow will flee 
before the Substance, and it is because* we 
have not, through faith, laid hold upon this 
substance, — because we allow the visible too 
much to obscure and exclude the real, that 
inward corruption retains its strength, and out- 
ward temptation acquires its power. 

Let us consider this a little further. Sin, or 
disobedience towards God, is only unbelief in 
an outward and visible form ; it is the practical 
denial of God's existence, the virtual disowning 

* See Note C. 



36 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

of His authority ; the saying in our lives what 
we have alreadv said in our hearts, either that 
" there is no God," or that, if there be indeed 
such an One, " we will not have Him to reign 
over us." To enter into this more fully, we 
need but to consider how the lives of us all are 
moulded and fashioned from within ; to mark 
how our conduct, even in the most ordinary 
affairs of daily life, is but the expression of our 
inner sentiment, an impress corresponding in 
every line with the stamp which opinion and 
feeling have set upon it. Of the least thought- 
ful and reflective man among us, we may say, 
"that even as he thinketh in his heart, so is 
he." His life will be, however unconsciously to 
himself, the result and manifestation of certain 
principles, be these good or bad or indifferent ; 
and even those who, according to the common 
saying, have " no principle," who are without 
any fixed rule or settled basis for action, will 
be found to be guided by opinions, however 
vague, and to be under the influence of senti- 
ments, however fluctuating. We are accustomed 
to smile at the man over whom abstract thought 
has gained such an ascendency as to make the 
things (however purely intellectual) with which 
his mind is daily conversant appear to him in 
the light of tangible realities, yet we are all of 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 37 

"us, without suspecting it, as much under the 
Empire of Ideas as he is : it is what we think 
about things, what we feel about them, what, in 
short, they are to ws, that gives them their true 
significance. Even in the case of whatever 
may be most palpable and material, it is not 
the mere beholding of it with our eyes, or being 
made conscious of its presence by any other of 
the senses, that makes it real to us ; until the 
spirit discerns, grasps, and appropriates unto 
itself the substance, until the Inner and the 
Outward meet and kiss each other, " seeing we 
do not perceive, and hearing we do not under- 
stand." What, for instance, is music to those 
w r ho, in familiar parlance, do not care about it ? 
They hear it, but it tells them nothing ; it has 
no message to deliver, no revelation to impart. 
What is the most magnificent scenery the world 
can offer to the man or woman who, placed in 
the midst of it, is thinking of something else, 
whether that " something else " may be the 
mightiest or the most trivial affair with which 
human thought can be occupied ? Indeed, in 
so much do all mortal affairs, from the great- 
est to " the meanest thing of every day," bear 
witness to the power of the unseen over the 
visible, that every aim and aspiration that the 
human heart can frame is but an unconscious 



38 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

confession that Man, according to the degree in 
which the conditions of his Being are raised 
above those of mere animal existence, does not 
live by bread alone ; his life is set between the 
spiritual and the material, and the outward 
object can only nourish and delight him in 
proportion to its correspondence with the inner 
need. 

The very mutability of human wishes, the 
vanity to which Man is subject, is a proof, if 
but a melancholy one, of the dignity of his 
nature, and indicates the immeasurable distance 
by which he is removed from the inferior races, 
which (each one after his kind) love, seek, and 
are contented with the objects adapted to their 
simple requirements, without versatility or sa- 
tiety. Instinct is an unerring, unvarying guide : 
to have at one time observed an animal's habits 
is to know what will at all times make it happy ; 
but it is more hard to search into and satisfy 
what an old Divine has called the covetous, rest- 
less, insatiable heart of man ; and this because 
all men, no less than the just one, live by 
Faith, — have all a spiritual element of existence, 
have all an ideal standard, be it lowly or lofty, 
false or true, with reference to which they are 
guided in choice and act. If we would obtain 
the key to any man's conduct, we must make 



A PRESENT HE A VEN. 39 

ourselves acquainted with his Creed, — we must 
find out what it is he believes in, if we would 
learn what it is he lives for, and in, and by. 
Until we have gained the secret of this corre- 
spondency, our lives are, as regards each other, 
writ in cipher. Could we but look at outward 
things from one common stand-point, all would 
be plain and legible, and it is our inability to do 
this which makes us such riddles and contradic- 
tions to each other ; for even those who most 
love the world do not love the same world : 
they who are serving the same master serve 
him under such different aspects that their aims 
are oftentimes as little intelligible to each other 
as they are to him who, bent upon a higher ob- 
ject, cares, comparatively speaking, for none of 
the things on which their desires are set. The 
ambitious man, the covetous one, the pleasure- 
seeker, stare at each other in wonder, perhaps 
in pity, w T hile the man who has placed his aim 
in every-day comfort and respectability gazes at 
all three with an inquiring cui bono ? They 
who live in the affections cannot understand 
how others should place their happiness in the 
exertion of the intellect. The purely domestic 
character is at a loss to appreciate the charm 
with which, to differently constituted minds, 
social or political distinction is invested. Fame 



40 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

is a shadow, gold is dross, pleasure a bubble, 
knowledge vanity and vexation of spirit, to those 
who do not care about them ; but to the man to 
whom any one of these is an object of preference 
and deliberate choice, who has (whether wisely 
or unwisely) set it before him as his happiness 
and final good, the end to which his life and 
energies have become the means, it is as the 
breath of his nostrils, an indispensable element 
of existence, in short, a reality, be its nature 
bad or good, its essence palpable or unseen. 
The things which men desire, pursue, and be- 
lieve in, low and trivial and unworthy as they 
may be in themselves, are, to the persons whom 
they thus influence, "no vain thing, but their 
life," — the subtle mainspring of thought and 
action, hidden and mysterious, and like that 
which it so closely resembles, the principle of 
natural vitality, only to be discovered in its 
workings. 

To understand this — that just according to 
the degree in which anything earthly or divine 
has become a felt reality, it will make itself a 
part of our thoughts and lives — will lead to 
the apprehension of a higher Truth. We shall 
.find ourselves more able to appreciate the cen- 
tral position in which the system of revealed 
religion has placed the faculty through whose 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 41 

aid alone the invisible things to which that 
system introduces us can be seen in their 
absolute awfulness and beauty, or recognized in 
their unspeakable relative importance to our- 
selves. Revelation, as regards our spiritual 
Being, places every one of us where, as regards 
mere natural existence, Creation set down the 
first Father of our Race, in a w r orld where all 
that surrounds us is new, and only to be appre- 
hended through the exercise of Faith, the soul's 
single yet sufficing sense, — the spiritual eye, 
and ear, and touch, and taste, and discerning, — 
the appointed medium between the human soul 
and Him who gave it ; without which it can as 
little acquaint itself with God, and with that 
inner world wherein with Him it lives, and 
moves, and has its being, as it can learn any- 
thing of His outward world without the aid 
and intervention of the bodily senses. Until we 
have availed ourselves of this medium, things 
that most surely are remain virtually to us as 
though they were not. We go on limiting our 
notion of the actual to the merely visible until 
even our use of the term " spiritual," witness- 
ing as it does to realities more tremendous, and, 
so to speak, more real in their essence and opera 
tion than any which can come under the cogni* 
zance of our material senses, carries with it the 



42 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

idea of something shadowy, vague, and impal- 
pable. Yet the Heaven we hope for, and the 
Hell we dread, are as much realities, though 
unseen ones, as the Earth we tread on. The 
kingdom of God within us, though it cometh 
not with observation, exists as surely as the 
kingdom of this world without us. God him- 
self — for the deeper these inquiries go, the 
surer do they send us back upon that awful 
ground and substance of all things, visible and 
invisible — is the self-existent source and spring 
of all Reality, though no man hath seen, or can 
see Him, at any time ; and He is only to be 
beholden as in a glass darkly, in such of His 
works as have been seen clearly from the foun- 
dation of the world. 

Let us think of this a little longer; let us 
look, by the light of our every-day experience, 
a little more closely into the nature of Belief. 
To believe in anything, whether, as in the case 
of a truth, we may accept it on the evidence of 
soul or reason,* or admit it, being a fact, on the 

* It is well to bear in mind that Faith, although it transcends 
Reason, is none the less, in the first instance, founded upon it. 
Belief, inasmuch as it is a species of mental choice or preference, 
presupposes a certain exercise of judgment; and F^nelon, I re- 
member, illustrates this position by comparing Faith with a guide, 
in whom, because we have first satisfied ourselves with regard to 
his character and qualifications, we place implicit reliance, and 
having let our judgment act once for all in resigning it to him, 
follow where he leads without question. 






A PRESENT HEAVEN. 43 

witness of outward sense, or the testimony of 
others, is to receive it with that thorough per- 
suasion which will not fail to guide our actions 
so far as they may be connected with the fact or 
truth in question, with a reference to its ac- 
knowledged existence. Belief,* whether its ob- 
ject is connected with this world or the spiritual 
one, which fails to embody itself in action, is 
such only in name, and stops short of genuine 
conviction. Put a man engaged in business in 
possession of tidings immediately affecting the 
affair he has in hand, the information he thus 
receives will necessarily influence his plan of 
action, and will do so in exact proportion to his 
confidence in its authenticity, and to the degree 
of importance he is disposed to attach to it, sup- 
posing its authenticity to be placed beyond a 
doubt. Let us turn this, by way of illustration, 
to the one great concern of spiritual life, and we 
shall be prepared to meet the remarkable state- 
ment of Baxter, who, in his later years, gives, 
as the result of a life-long experience among the 
souls of men, his firm conviction that the true 
cause for the indifference and godlessness of the 
great mass of society lies in this, that the careless 
and ignorant who compose it do not, in a specu- 
lative sense, believe in God or in a future world. 

* See Note D. 



44 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

f 

And though our full acquiescence in this state- 
ment is modified by the knowledge that, man 
being the inheritor of a perverted will as well as 
of a darkened understanding, the intellect may- 
retain a sort of petrifying hold upon truths by 
which the will remains uninfluenced ; though the 
course of every-day life shows us that nothing is 
more easy even in things of temporal interest than 
to see the good, and yet pursue the evil, because 
it is preferred, — still of any man of whom it may 
be said " that he careth not for God, neither is 
God in all his thoughts," it may also, in a cer- 
tain sense, be affirmed that he does not believe 
in Him. The soul over which the ideas of God, 
and judgment, and eternity exert no practical 
influence, has never received them within itself 
as conscious, felt realities ; or a course of action 
in correspondence with the awful sense of per- 
sonal accountability, which, when so received, 
they must inevitably awaken, would not so 
much have been induced as compelled. For 
acknowledging a Divine revelation to be true, 
the facts it unfolds are so confessedly important, 
that it would appear hard to accept the facts up- 
on which our eternal weal or woe depends, as we 
would accept that of the existence of Aurung- 
zebe or Charlemagne, — a fact truly, but one 
which lies apart and remote from us, without 






A PRESENT HE A VEN. 45 

bearing on our present day, or influence upon 
our individual destiny, — something which has 
been, and is done with forever. 

And farther, let us contrast — excepting the 
case of persons whose peculiar studies have 
given them a sort of individual interest in such 
inquiries — our general reception of any purely 
scientific fact, say the discovery of a new planet, 
with that which we accord to the establishment 
of a point or principle connected with any great 
political or social question, or with any of those 
subjects of minor yet intimate interest which 
bear upon our daily health and comfort, our for- 
tunes, or our affections. And let us remember 
that it is among these questions, say rather above, 
and yet inclusive of them all, that Christianity 
places itself. The Gospel is no historical monu- 
ment, to be studied or left alone at pleasure : 
it does not challenge attention on the score of 
its curiosity or interest, but claims it on the 
ground of its personal importance to every one 
of us. It proclaims itself to be " no vain thing," 
in the sense in which all earthly knowledge, 
how excellent and glorious soever, is vanity, but 
" the life " of those whom it addresses. When 
it tells us of a God, in whose favor is Life, and 
makes known to us the way to obtain that favor, 
there is no moment, either of our present or 



46 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

future existence, through which the facts it re- 
veals do not send a pulsation : it links itself with 
each grain of the sands of time, with each billow 
of the ocean of eternity ; it has to do with all 
that the heart and soul of man can conceive and 
execute, endure and enjoy, now and forever. 
When I think of this Gospel, and consider how, 
like Him of whom it testifies, it must of neces- 
sity be everything to those to whom it is any- 
thing at all, I can perceive a consistency, if a 
dreadful one, in the case of the multitudes who 
altogether reject and ignore it. To the wicked 
" who know not God, neither desire the knowl- 
edge of His ways," God is nothing, neither do 
they wish to be anything to Him. The lan- 
guage of their hearts, if an unspoken one, is 
none the less, " Depart from us," and their in- 
difference to the great means of salvation is 
more than accounted for by their acknowledged 
contempt for its end ; but it is so far otherwise 
with them to whom the end — even the end 
of all faith, the salvation of their souls — is 
precious, and desired above all good, that I am 
at a loss to understand how many among us, so 
esteeming the end, seem yet so inadequately to 
appreciate and avail ourselves of the means: in 
other words, I cannot learn how it is that the 
Gospel has become to us (in the sense which I 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 47 

have attached to the word Reality) a less real 
thing than the world it has to contend with, and 
the sin it has to overcome. We have slipped, 
as a Christian people, into a position far below 
the one given us by God ; and while w r e are 
ready, as I have said, to accuse ourselves of 
want of diligence in making our calling and 
election sure, is it certain that we have yet, in 
the words of the Apostle, seen our calling and 
attained to a just appreciation of what, on our 
part, is the hope of this calling, and what, 
on God's part, is the exceeding greatness of 
His power wrought in Christ to us-ward that 
believe ? 

It has been well said, with regard to objects 
of temporal interest, that w T e must know some- 
thing of a thing before we can feel any curiosity 
respecting it ; the very desire for information 
on a subject presupposing the presence of an 
already awakened spring of interest. Now 
when I apply this truth to the highest fact it 
can concern, and consider of how many things 
having to do with the deeper and more intimate 
relations of the human soul with God we 
" willingly remain ignorant," I cannot but feeJ 
justified in tracing back this ignorance, and the 
indifference with which it is twin-born and 
twin-existent, to the want of a firm belief in 



48 A PRESENT HE A VEN. 

those great fundamental truths of Revelation 
upon which the fabric of man's salvation rests. 
We do not know enough of God to make us 
wish to know more, and have yet need of being 
rooted and grounded in the first principles of 
salvation. For until these are more to us than 
matters of (so-called) faith, until they are unto 
us matters of Hfe, things not merely to be held 
by as traditions, but to be lived upon as facts, — 
things that we feel we could not do without, and 
to resign our hold upon w r hich would be con- 
sciously to let go a portion of our Being, — we 
do not truly believe them, we only say that we 
do so. We do not believe them — I speak now 
of verities which it would shock us, in a dog- 
matic sense, to doubt — until they have passed 
within our souls as principles, and raised up 
within those souls the power and energy of their 
own life. In these two words, the most solemn 
which human lips can frame, " I believe,'' lies a 
power to ingraft the soul that utters them from 
its depths, into the very strength and fulness of 
every truth of which they are spoken ; and when 
I think of this, and recall the great fact whereof 
we affirm most constantly that we " believe " it, 
I mean the doctrine of the Trinity, I long that 
we should pass, as regards it, from the confession 
of the lips, which is Orthodoxy, to the confession 



A PRESEXT HE A VEX. 49 

of the heart, which is Salvation. For to believe 
in One God, the Father of men and spirits, re- 
vealed to us in His Son's life, reconciled to us 
through His Son's death, and imparted to us 
through the agency of the life-giving Spirit, 
is to live in the sense, to rely upon the strength, 
and to rejoice in the sweetness of a Divine 
relationship. It is to knoiv that we are no 
longer strangers and foreigners with our God, 
but to feel that, in the bonds of this everlasting 
covenant, He is in us, and we are in Him, 
brought near by the Son, kept near by the 
Spirit, bound together in a threefold cord which 
shall not be quickly broken. 

Until we thus learn to realize and draw the full 
value from the truths which are most common- 
ly, in the sense of speculative assent, believed 
among us, we shall be at a loss to understand 
how it is that the Apostles, speaking unto us 
by the Spirit, continually address us as being 
already in * possession of certain assured privi- 
leges, and urge us, on the ground of that posses- 

* We know that the visible Church of Christ has never exhib- 
ited a community without spot or blemish, and we have histori- 
cal evidence for the imperfection of one Church particularly 
addressed by St. Paul. Yet all visible members, save those com- 
ing under the awful exclusion of the "except ye be reprobate," 
are exhorted to repentance, to purity, to diligence, as the case 
may require, not on the ground of their danger in being without 
Christ, but on that of their responsibility as being in Him. u Know 
3 D 



50 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

sion, to go on to make further privileges, gifts, 
and promises our own. The Apostles, speaking 
to their converts, do not so much admonish them 
as would probably be done in our present re- 
ligious teaching, upon the ground of responsi- 
bility as of capability. They do not so often 
say, Because ye know such things, ye ought so 
and so to act, as, because ye know and have 
received, ye can so walk and please God. They 
base their arguments, their exhortations, upon 
a foregone conclusion, even the life and death 
and rising again of our Lord Jesus, and the 
benefits which all those who accept Him have 

ye not that ye are members of Christ, Temples of the Holy Ghost, 
habitations of God through the Spirit? " 

I sometimes wish we were, as a people, more in the habit of 
considering our relations with God under what may be called 
their covenanted aspect. Salvation in Christ is not only a gift 
from God to man, it is also a bond, a living perpetual tie, placing- 
us in assured relations with the Father, and enabling us to take 
up that ancient plea, " Have respect unto the covenant," with all 
the energies of the renewed nature. " The writings of the New 
Covenant," — how I love this, the title by which the Gospel writ- 
ings collectively were known to the Primitive Church ! It brings 
them before us as that which they truly are, the very bonds and 
indentures of our fellowship in Christ Jesus. Perhaps we have 
lost something by the substitution of the word " Testament," and 
yet it is hard to choose ; for as conveying the idea of a gift it 
bears witness to the freedom of Divine grace, the fulness of Di- 
vine love. Also as belonging to Death, it points to that " neces- 
sary " death of the Testator upon which the everlasting covenant 
between God and man was like the temporary one, established 
■" not without blood." Gal. iii. 15. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 51 

received, and are even now receiving thereby. 
They do not stop in every sentence, as we are 
so apt to do in our daily searchings of heart, to 
break down the wall of partition, and to feel 
after the lurking enmity; they* assume that 
these are already taken away and abolished in 
Christ ; and standing in this Beautiful Gate of 
the Temple, His full, finished, and perfect sacri- 
fice, satisfaction, and atonement for the sins of 
the whole world, encourage us to advance, by 
this new and living way, even " within the 
Holiest." Considering this deeply, I often 
think that, if we felt the Rock under us as 
surely as they did, our feet would move more 
swiftly on the path of perfection to which they 
point, and incline to believe, that the temple of 
our hearts and lives is less " fitly framed to- 
gether" than it was with these First Builders, 
simply because it is not based so firmly upon 
the One Foundation ; and yet I say this with 
diffidence, because I have long been persuaded 
that there is no fact with which the Gospel ac- 
quaints us in which the generality of Christians 
so truly believe, and so sincerely rest their hopes 
of acceptance with God, as that of our Saviour's 
Atonement. In many facts resting upon a kin- 
dred basis of authority, more particularly such 

* Note E. 



52 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

as are connected with the nature, office, and 
agency of the Third Person of the Blessed Trin- 
ity, His continual indwelling with the Faithful, 
and the fellowship which they in whom He abides 
enjoy with the Father and the Son, I dare ven- 
ture to assert that Christians in general do not 
believe ; at least, if we may judge from their 
habitual modes of thought and expression, these 
great and deeply consolatory realities have taken 
no apparent hold upon their hearts and lives. 

Yet it would be to charge ourselves falsely to 
say, that the great doctrine of the Atonement, 
the keystone of salvation, is set at naught by us 
builders ; or that we are guilty of counting this 
blood of the everlasting covenant an unholy or 
unhallowing thing. For while to those who are 
without, the necessary, the meritorious death of 
Christ remains the stumbling-block and stone 
of offence, the chosen point of attack, ever 
openly assaulted, ever secretly undermined, to 
those who are within, the Stone thus set at 
naught and rejected is still the head of the 
corner : it is still the tried stone, the sure foun- 
dation, the Rock whereof Faith speaks, " Set 
me upon it, for it is higher than I,"* Love's 

* " When I," saith our Lord, " am lifted up from the earth, 1 
will draw all men unto Me." The death of Christ is here set 
forth as that which shall most powerfully attract the heart of 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 53 

sure, abiding Pillar of remembrance, whereon 
Love's secret is written and graven with a pen 
of iron forever. To them who believe, Christ is 
precious. Multitudes among us live and die 
upon no other hope than that sure and certain 
one set before us in merits of the Lamb slain 
from the foundation of the world ; and all that 
I would say is, that even here, where we most 
cordially embrace the fact, we do not, for want 
of what I will call a holy and courageous Logic, 
accept the conclusion to which it directly leads ; 
and by thus stopping short, we fail to reach the 
breadth, and height, and fulness to which a 
single and simple fact like the great one in 
question, if implicitly realized, would carry us. 
If we would have the Gospel bless us wholly, 
we must receive it wholly : we must let our 
Lord, the Messenger of the New Covenant, 
make full proof of His Ministry among us ; 
and remembering that a Divine Sentence is 
upon the lips of this Prince, — a Word, whereof 
it may be truly said, that u which way soever 

man to God, and this because it is the strongest proof of love. 
Love kindles and calls forth love; " We count that" says John of 
Weasel, " to be the most lovable which we know to be the most loving V 
The love of Christ has achieved the greatest things, and hence 
must produce the most powerful effects; it has displayed the 
greatest devotedness, and consequently must possess the strongest 
attractive power." 



54 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

we turn, it will prosper," — let us be careful to 
hearken unto all that, in this great matter, the 
Lord our God has spoken concerning us ; let us 
take heed to gather up each crumb of this true 
Bread, to wring out the very fulness of this 
Heavenly Vine, crushed for us in the wine- 
press of the wrath of God. 

For to believe in the Atonement, that is, in 
the Father reconciled to us in His Son, and in 
Him propitious, is to have taken, in the words 
of the Psalmist, God for our hope, and also for 
our portion in the land of the living ; it is to be 
made even now a partaker of the fulness of 
Him who filleth all things, and to enter upon 
the present fruition of the gifts which He, 
having ascended up on high, has received for 
us men. In this greatest boon, even that of 
the precious blood-shedding of Christ, all lesser 
ones are of necessity included. God in giving 
us his His Son has given us, with and in Him, 
as the Apostle tells us, " all things." To accept 
Christ Jesus as the Way, is also to receive Him 
as the Life ; to rest upon His sacrifice as per- 
fect, is also to believe that it is sufficient, not 
only for final reconciliation with God, but for 
that actual restoration to His favor, which the 
idea of true reconciliation includes. I long that 
we should apprehend this essential fact, that 






A PRESENT HEAVEN. 55 

t% God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
Himself " ; because I am convinced that, did we 
see the Cross more clearly, the light which 
streams from it would make many things plain 
that are now perplexing ; and because I feel we 
have but to weigh this matter in the balance of 
Scripture to become aware of how much we are 
the losers, by limiting the benefits we receive 
by our Lord's meritorious death and passion to 
an exemption from the future punishment of 
sin. To this, I think, the generally received 
estimate of our Saviour's satisfaction is re- 
stricted, to a degree which tends to reduce the 
crowning Sacrifice to the level of those which 
went before and prefigured it. Our Lord's 
Death, the very substance of these things that 
foreshadowed it, is invested with a figurative, 
and, so to speak, typical character ; and this 
better hope, by the which we draw nigh unto 
God, is brought down to a shadow of good 
things to come : if it should be asked when ? we 
might answer, in the hour of death, and in the 
day of judgment, for it seems as if Christians, 
in their sincere, yet partial acceptance of their 
Lord's merits, waited until then to plead their 
efficacy with God. Yet is this Hope set before 
us for life as well as for death, not only in the 
hour and the day of which no man knoweth, 



56 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

but in every hour and day of this our mortal 
life, in all time of our tribulation, in all time of 
our wealth, from the sorest pang to the meanest 
provocation of every day, may the Christian, 
having once laid hold upon it, flee unto it for 
refuge. The soul which can say with St. Paul, 
" It is Christ that died," has obtained with him 
a triumphant answer to every doubt within, has 
found a stronghold from every difficulty without. 
Having obtained, through the one Mediator, a 
present access to the Father, it finds, in that 
access, the supply of all its deeply-felt wants, 
the satisfaction of all its yearnings. 

Having entered in by the Door, it is " saved," — 

yea, it may go in and out, and find pasture ; for 

He who has delivered our souls from death has, 

at the same time, delivered our eyes from tears, 

and our feet from falling. " Return, then, unto 

thy rest, O my soul," may the Christian now 

say, "for thy Lord hath dealt bountifully 

with thee ! He who is become thy 

salvation will be also thy shield 

and thy song, the strength 

of thy life, as well 

as thy portion 

forever." 



III. 




THE GOSPEL RECEIVED HISTORICALLY. 

' Say not in thine heart, Who shall descend into the deep, to bring up 
Christ again from the dead?" — Romans x. 7. 

^) HE Gospel is a history, inasmuch as 
it sets before us God manifested in 
the flesh ; a power or Agency, in- 
=^£ asmuch as it reveals to us God com- 
municated by the Spirit ; and the life-walk and 
triumph of Faith consists in maintaining these 
two points * in their essential connection, and 
thus keeping God — seen under one relation and 
felt under the other — "always before it." I 
think a certain deadness of the letter has crept 
over us, because, not being as a Christian people 
sufficiently at home in our own polity and con- 
stitution, we do not so fully as in the Primitive 
Age appreciate the vital connection which exists 
between the great facts w T hich the Gospel re- 

* See Note E. 
3* 



58 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

cords and the great principles which, through 
those facts, it communicates. We seem to have 
in some degree lost what the first builders so 
abundantly rejoiced in, a principle of cohesion 
between the work done and the work doing ; 
and thus the events with which the Gospel nar- 
rative makes us acquainted, instead of being, 
every one of them, " very nigh " to us, bound 
up and interleaved within the volume of our 
personal experience, have to be fetched, as we 
want them, from the remote distance where they 
lie, like the bones in the Valley of prophetic 
Vision, dry and sapless, detached from each 
other, and from all connection with the life that 
we are now living upon earth. When we re- 
ceive along with each of these facts the sign 
which was given unto Moses, and learn that it 
is * I am which hath sent it unto us, a breath of 

* True Passion always passes into the Present; we see this in 
preaching and in oratory; even in narrative, when a speaker 
warms, he leaves the dry historic manner and appears to describe 
what is at present passing under his eyes. Herder says that the 
poverty and simplicity of the Hebrew verb, which has scarcely 
more than one tense, tends to imprint the language with a highly 
poetic and prophetic character, because it brings all things within 
the present moment. Most languages, he says, that are rich in 
tenses, have perfected them through historic writing; but in the 
Hebrew record — an inspired poetry, in which history and proph- 
ecy meet — the want of exactness is not felt, and the very ab- 
sence of precision and certainty tends to bring the now into clearer 
relief. What one verse in the prophetic writings relates to us of 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 59 

life is infused within all that has been formal 
and historical : across the statements of the letter, 
of which, taken singly and apart, we may have 
said that " they are very dry," a spirit passes, 
they come together,* and behold, " they live," 
and stand up on their feet an exceeding great 
army, fighting for and with us in the battle, 
which is like the one recorded in Chronicles, 
both behind us and before. 

The nominal Christian accepts the facts which 
Revelation imparts, and even recognizes, though 
but in a vague and indeterminate manner, their 
bearing and influence upon his spiritual life and 
eternal destiny. He confesses, in a speculative 
sense, that these things cannot be spoken against : 
as I have said, he believes the Gospel. The 
experimental Christian believes in it. To him, 
the events with which, under either Covenant, 
the records of inspiration acquaint him, though 
not mere matters of history, are really such in a 
deeper and fuller meaning than we are accus- 
tomed to attach to the expression, and he studies 
them just (to compare spiritual things with tem- 

Past time, the next predicts of the Future. It is as if the last made 
the presence of the thing enduring and eternal, while the former part 
gives the speech the certainty of past time, as if it were all already 
fulfilled. Thus the oneness of time strengthens the expression 
both ways. 
* Ezekiel xxxvii. 7. 



60 A PRESENT HE A VEN. 

poral) in the spirit in which he would investigate 
the history of the country in which he lives, and 
with whose constitution his general well-being is 
identified. As the inhabitant of a great and 
free country, he cannot but be aware that, under 
a different Past, his present condition and future 
prospects would be altogether different. Had 
not this battle been fought, this invader repulsed, 
this immunity obtained, this charter granted, he 
would hold at this moment a less favorable posi- 
tion than that which he now occupies. And 
thus are the Constitutions of our Christian 
Polity based upon a grand historic Past, from 
which the Present draws its rich capabilities, the 
Future its blissful certainties ; upon which, as 
upon a foundation which cannot be shaken, the 
kingdoms of grace and glory have been estab- 
lished, and without which each of them would 
be still, as to earlier ages, no more than a dream, 
a hope, a possibility. 

The language of the Apostles is that of men 
who, knowing wherein and whereby they stand, 
feel and rejoice in all the security of their posi- 
tion. To them, the Gospel, as yet written only 
in the life and death and rising again of their 
Lord, is a power, an energy, in the strength of 
which, in the words of the Prophet Isaiah,* they 

* Isaiah xxvii. 5. 



A PRESENT HE A VEN. 61 

lay hold upon God's strength, and act, and pray, 
and prevail. For in each event of our Saviour's 
life upon earth — that lively Parable, in which 
the Almighty, no longer speaking to His people 
by words, has seen fit to act out His good will 
and pleasure concerning them — they discern 
at once the token, accomplishment, and seal of 
some peculiar purpose of God, and as such they 
accept, feed upon, and rest in it. We must enter 
as deeply as they do into the profound and mys- 
terious connection which exists between the 
natural and visible life of Christ upon earth, and 
the spiritual and hidden life which the faithful 
soul enjoys with Him in God, before we can 
understand the tenacity with which they fasten 
upon every fact of our Lord's history, and 
lay upon each event and incident of His life a 
detaining grasp, that will not let it go until it 
has blessed them. We never find them contem- 
plating the mystery of Redemption as an exhibi- 
tion of God's power and mercy, to be gazed into 
as by the angels with delighted w r onder. This, 
they say, hath God done, and for us. They 
acknowledge it to be His work, a work wrought 
for and in them, perfect, complete, and lacking 
nothing. As all that they desire is to be found 
in Christ, " in whom are all things, and by whom 
all things consist" (or hold together), we never 



62 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

find them drawing the distinction between Doc- 
trine and Practice, w T hich we are so apt to make, 
or treating of each apart from the other, as if it 
were a matter of separate obligation. They 
know too well in how much all that we are or 
can be, the newness and fulness of our life in 
God, is wrapped up and involved in a Saviour's 
accomplished work, to think of detaching either 
principle or precept from the fact from which 
each draws its life-blood. 

Seeing this truth clearly, that God hath made 
Christ unto us wisdom and righteousness, sancti- 
fication and redemption, all their teaching leads 
back to Him, in whom, as within a burning 
focus, the various manifestations of God's power 
and mercy, the glory which He hath in Himself, 
the grace which He hath evidenced to us, have 
been made to converge. Since all that was 
sometime darkness has now become light in the 
Lord, in whom it has pleased the Father of men 
and spirits that all fulness should dwell, and 
through whom, by the Ministration of the Spirit, 
He has willed that we should all receive of that 
fulness, they are no longer ignorant of God's 
feelings towards them, no longer in doubt as to 
His purposes. Within this new and living Way 
the Creator and His creature have met, been 
reconciled, and been united ; the Divine Nature 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 63 

has come down to meet the human, the human 
nature has been taken up into the Divine. 
Therefore, as I have said, the Apostles recognize 
a continual parallel between the events of the 
life which Christ lived for us, and those of the 
life which we live in Him, and find a coun- 
terpart for all that He did and suffered in 
the natural body which was prepared for Him, 
in what is even now being transacted around 
and within them in the mystical body, spoken 
of as the fulness of Him which filleth all in all. 
In all that Christ has wrought for them, they 
discern at once the earnest and the surety of 
what He is to work in them ; and thus, whether 
they would inquire concerning the Will or the 
Doctrine, their feet find no rest but in growing 
to the blessed steps of their Lord's most holy 
life upon earth. 

All that the servants possess is derived from 
the Master, upon whose hand their eyes wait 
continually. Without Him, and independently 
of the Work which He has done, they are 
and can do nothing ; yet with Him, and by 
favor of what He has accomplished for them, 
they can perform all things. Therefore they 
take their stand upon this word, — Because. 
Because, says St. John, the Word w r as made 
flesh and dwelt among us, of His fuln^^s we 



(VI .4 PRESENT HEAVEN. 

have all received, and grace for grace. Be- 
cause Christ, in this body of our humiliation, 
has suffered once for sin, St. Paul admonishes 
his converts to reckon themselves to be "dead" 
unto it ; and because lie has taken up the same 
body into the lite and glory which lie had with 
the Father from the beginning, he exhorts them 
to number themselves among those who, with 
their risen Lord, "are alive from the dead/' 
All their carefulness, their zeal, their holy anx- 
iety for themselves and others, tends to this one 
point, that as the lite o^ God hath been made 
manifest to them in Christ Jesus, so may the 
life of Jesus be made manifest in their mortal 
flesh ; so that lie who hath raised up the body 
of their Lord may raise up their spirits in the 
newness o( the life which is in Ilim. Their 
sense of assimilation, of identification with Him, 
in whom they live, and war, and triumph, takes 
sometimes a strength and intimacy of expres- 
sion* which we, self-withdrawn farther from the 
centre oi' light, and warmth, and blessedness, 
are almost at a loss to understand. Unto these 
faithful ones, not only each word which their 

* As when St. Paul, in holy exultation, says, "I am crucified 
with Christ, nevertheless I live"; adding, to carry out the more 
fully his sublime meaning, 4i Yet not I. but Christ liveth in me"; 
and speaks of "always bearing about in the body the dying" and 
the marks "oi our Lord Jesus." — 2 Cor. iv. 10; Gal. vi. 17. 



A PRESENT HEA VEN. 88 

Lord hath spoken, but every deed which Se 
hath wrought, is even as it were bread upon 

which they I in a continual Sacrament, 

and Bet before their hearers the food by which 

they are themselves nourished, saying, " Take, 

and eat. This is the body which was given for 

. — a body of which not a bone must be 

brok Of all which their Lord has done 

and suffered for them in the flesh, they can 

I to lose nothing; for each event of His 

i nd received by Faith in Him, is 

unto them an outward and visible Sign, through 

the power and efficacy of which a corresponding 

i id and spiritual grace is conveyed within 

the believing soul. 

Now, to us these facts of our Lord's history, 
taken a- mere facts, are as real as they w T ere to 
the Apostles ; we believe as firmly as they did, 
that to reconcile man with his Maker, Christ 
>k upon Him our human nature, and as 
man and for man, lived, suffered, died, rose 
ii, and even now liveth at the right hand of 
. With them w r e also connect these facts 
with the spiritual interests of humanity, and con- 
that it was for our sins that He died, for our 
:ion that He rose again. How comes 
it, then, that our faith, as compared with theirs, 
leclined into a dry speculative conviction, — 



66 A PRESENT HE A VEN. 

the assent of the understanding rather than the 
consent of the heart, — binding us in traditionary 
adhesion to the doctrines of the Gospel, rather 
than rooting us in that effectual belief through 
which these very doctrines live, grow, and un- 
fold within the soul, as principles to be exerted, 
powers to be used, gifts and blessings to be 
enjoyed? How is it that the Gospel, with the 
system of Divinely-appointed relations it dis- 
closes, has become, as to its practical purpose 
and interest, so much less to us than to them? 
Can it be that we imagine our interest in it to 
be in any way inferior, and the Christ of whom 
it testifies to be in some degree less ours than 
theirs ? Such an inference might be very nat- 
urally drawn from the way in which we are 
accustomed to speak of our own position as 
contrasted with that of the Apostles, primitive 
worthies, and even with that occupied by the 
saints under the First Covenant.* Ordinary 

* Our attention is frequently drawn from the pulpit to these 
chosen servants of God about whom so much, whether by way 
of example or of warning, has been written for our learning; but 
the mention of them is seldom, I think, accompanied by a suf- 
ficiently ample recognition of the different position which we, 
the children of the regeneration, occupy towards God, and of 
the fuller privileges and higher responsibilities involved in it. 
Our present day is the day which the prophets, kings, and right- 
eous men desired to see, and seeing but afar off, through faith, 
were glad, — a day whereof the prophecy is fulfilled, that he who 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 67 

Christians of the present day cannot be ex- 
pected, we say, to feel and act like these emi- 
nent persons. Yet who that looks into this 
matter by the light of Scripture does not see 
that to be an ordinary Christian,* a Christian 
of the present day, is to possess what the elder 
saints desired, to be placed where the Apostles 
stood — in Christ — with whom is neither after 
nor before, neither beo-inning of time nor end 
of days ? What was enough for the first Chris- 
tians will prove sufficient for the last, " to be 
found in Him," without whom we can do noth- 
ing ; and it is certain (however vaguely we may 
allow ourselves to speak upon the subject) that 
the Apostles, w T ho, like us, neither possessed 
nor could possess anything out of their Saviour, 
were in the enjoyment of no one privilege which 
we, who are baptized with them by one Spirit 
into one body, f do not at this moment enjoy, 
and must continue to enjoy, so long as that body, 
on the Spirit's express testimony, " is filled with 
the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." J 

In point, therefore, of access, intimacy, and 
union, God has put no difference between us 
and them; and yet there is a difference, one 

is feeble among God's children reconciled in Christ shall be as 
David. (Zech. xii. 8.) 
* Note F. t 1 Cor. xii. 13. { Eph. i. 22, 23. 



68 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

of which we are deeply conscious. If God has 
set us where He set them, in heavenly places in 
Christ, we know that we do not stand like them, 
where He has placed us, or possess, with them, 
what He has given us. Our actual position is 
not, like theirs, identical with our recognized one ; 
and this we feel and deplore keenly, yet none 
the less adapt ourselves to an order of things 
which we choose to look upon as necessary, 
without pausing to ask ourselves a question 
which seems to arise very naturally, Is this 
Gospel, so little to us, the same as that which 
was so much to them ? Have we received it in 
its integrity, accepting that which St. Paul was 
so zealous to declare, the whole counsel of God 
concerning us ? or have we all this time been 
unconsciously leaving out some part or parts of 
the great system the revealed economy of Grace 
discloses ? It behooves us to lend a deep atten- 
tion to these questions. Their practical impor- 
tance is incalculable, for we know that with God 
every means must conduce to its appointed end ; 
nothing has been made or designed by Him in 
vain, and though we cannot as yet discern the 
whole of His gracious purpose, nor understand 
the divinely-constructed machinery by which He 
has seen fit to accomplish it, we know enough 
of His doings to be aware, that to work per- 



A PRESENT HEAVEN 69 

fectly it must work together,* and if any one 
part is left to rust and stiffen, its inaction will 
necessarily impede the motion of the rest. 

The essential difference between us and the 
Apostles — in other words, between historical 
and experimental belief — appears to consist in 
this, that, in connection with the visible facts of 
our Lord's history, they recognize, far more 
fully and practically than we do, a great invisi- 
ble fact. I mean the presence and the power 
of the spiritual agency, the dispenser of the 
treasury of heaven, to whom the human soul 
must be indebted for all that it can know or 
can receive of God, and through whose inward 
working a Saviour's outward work is made 
effectual, by being applied, appropriated, and 
brought home to the individual heart and con- 
science. 

The Gospel received in the mere letter can 
profit us no more than the Law, but will remain, 
like it, an external rule, instructing us in many 
things, but imparting nothing ; its facts, received 
as mere facts, and held as such within the mind 
in suspension, lie there dormant and undevel- 



* It behooves us rightly to divide the truth, to set it forth in all 
it? features, to view it in all its bearings, and from every side; for 
every doctrine neglected has a fearful avenging power, and will, 
yea, and does, reassert itself. — R. A. Suckling. 



70 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

oped. They quicken no pulsation, and exercise 
no permeating influence. Though they carry a 
principle of life within them, it is one which 
cannot germinate of its own accord, or exert its 
energy, save with the aid of that Divine aux- 
iliary, so often likened in Scripture to those 
elemental influences — the dew, the rain, the 
fire, the wind blowing where it listeth — with- 
out whose co-operation no natural process can 
be accomplished. " It is the Spirit that giveth 
life." Upon this point Scripture speaks plainly ; 
and even natural reason, if duly exercised, will 
enable us to understand how it is that St. Paul 
declares that no man, except through the Spirit 
of God, can either receive or know anything of 
those " things of God " * which it is the pecu- 
liar office of that Spirit to impart. For knowl- 
edge, whether its object be tangible or spiritual, 
earthly or Divine, can only reach the seat of 
consciousness within us, through a medium an- 
swering to the conditions of its peculiar nature. 
A natural object must be apprehended by the 
aid of the natural senses, an idea must be recog- 
nized through the exertion of the intellect, a 
spiritual truth attained to through the exercise 
of a spiritual faculty. In no other way can 
any of these obtain that true recognition which 

* 1 Cor. iii. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 71 

makes them really our own. We shall all be 
ready to confess that no exertion of the intel- 
lect can realize, no description, however accu- 
rate, convey, the true idea of a color, an odor, 
a sound, a flavor. To know what these things 
are, we must have seen, smelt, heard, and tasted 
them ; and as with natural so w r ith spiritual 
things. Here, also, we must " taste and see " ; 
taste before we see, taste in order to see. Our 
very perception must partake of the nature of 
experience, as all that w r e can gain otherwise is 
but vague and conjectural, — a notion about the 
thing, not the knowledge of it. 

The Apostles speak as men who have learnt 
the full force of this distinction ; and we never 
find them confounding things natural and spirit- 
ual with each other, or expecting to arrive at 
the understanding of the latter by means of any 
natural faculty or intellectual process. They 
know that through the seeing eye and the hear- 
ing ear man is placed in communication with 
the outward world of sense ; they are aware, 
that through the conceptions of his heart and 
mind he can hold communion with the inner 
world of thought and of feeling, — those " things 
of a man " which, as St. Paul testifies, each man 
can realize through an exertion of his own self- 
consciousness : but when it is " the things of 



72 A PRESENT HE A VEN. 

God " that are in question, they rely no longer 
upon the natural faculties and powers, knowing 
that these are only to be searched out by " the 
spirit that is in man, and through the inspiration 
of the Almighty that giveth understanding. " 

It is through this unction from the Holy One 
that they know all things ; and it is somewhat 
remarkable that we never find the Apostles 
grounding their confidence upon a privilege to 
which we are often disposed to attribute it, — I 
mean the fact of their having known our Saviour 
in His human person. To those who are con- 
scious of possessing their Lord, it is little merely 
to have seen Him ; and with them the external 
r iew is so merged in the sense of inward reali- 
zation, that St. Paul, in describing the intimacy 
and fulness of the life in which all things are 
made new, exclaims, "Yea, though we have 
known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth 
know we Him no more." To understand the 
bearing of these memorable words, w-e must 
drink so deeply into the spirit in which they are 
uttered, as to be able to meet their speaker in 
his explicit statement, that no man can say (in a 
saving and effectual sense) " that Jesus is the 
Lord but by the Holy Ghost " ; and this, be- 
cause any acknowledgment of Him that rests 
on merely outward evidence must necessarily 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 73 

fall far short of that good confession, for the 
utterance of which St. Peter's Master pro- 
nounced him blessed. That, on the Master's 
own testimony, was the expression of a deep 
inward conviction wrought by God Himself 
upon the soul ; and it was not because Christ 
had been manifested to St. Peter in the flesh, 
but because He had been revealed to him in the 
Spirit, that he was able to answer our Lord's 
question, " Whom sayest thou that I am ? " * in 
the words which drew forth this comment: 
" Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona, for flesh 
and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but 
my Father which is in heaven." Now it is 
evident, upon the warrant of these words, that 
the Apostles, to whom w r e ascribe so many supe- 
rior advantages, were exactly in our own posi- 
tion in this one respect, that they conld know 
nothing except they received it from heaven, — 
could learn nothing truly, even of Him whose 
words they listened to, and whose steps they 
followed in, except they wetre taught it of God. 
Without a spiritual enlightenment, even when 
they looked upon their Lord, their eyes were 
holden that they should not know Him ; without 
a spiritual approximation, even when they sat 
with Him in the house, and walked with Him in 

* Mutt. xvi. 15. 



74 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

the way, they were not really nigh Him. Their 
need was as great as is ours of that inner illu- 
mination, that internal contact, without which it 
would have availed them little that they had 
seen with their eyes, and handled with their 
hands, of the Word of life ; for all this might 
have been, and yet have left them without that 
knowledge of a Saviour which is life and 
peace, — have left them, too, among the number 
of those to whom, after having lived in their 
presence, and taught in their streets, He will 
none the less one day profess, — "I never knew 

you." 

For it was not every one who saw our Lord 
upon earth that saw, with righteous Simeon, His 
salvation. While many thronged and pressed 
upon Him in the crowd, few really touched Him ; 
and the Scriptures make it evident, that among 
the multitudes who witnessed His mighty and 
merciful deeds, were many persons " who seeing 
did not understand," and remained in a state of 
unbelief not to be overcome by any outward 
testimony, even that of a miracle. Yet because 
they saw his works, and in some cases were 
themselves the subjects of them, they must 
have believed in them, as matters of fact, and 
must also, on the evidence of such facts, have 
believed in Him, as a Being endowed with won- 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 75 

derful and superhuman powers. How then was 
it that they did not, at the same time, believe to 
the saving of their souls ? The answer to this 
will go far to explain to us how it is that so 
many among us believe, and in a certain sense 
understand our Bibles, yet, for want of a spir- 
itual insight and appropriation, fail, while we 
accept the fact, to receive along with it the life- 
imparting principle it encloses. What the Word 
spoken (whether by w r ord or sign) was to them, 
the Word written is to us, and neither can profit, 
so long as it is received in the word only. They 
had the fact, and we have its record ; and either, 
to be made effectual to the heart and conscience 
of any one of us, requires to be brought home 
to that heart and conscience, by the Spirit of 
demonstration and of power. 

We love our Bibles, and we think that we 
believe them : let us ask ourselves this question, 
Can persons believe the Bible who do not be- 
lieve what the Bible tells them? In other 
words, Can they believe the Bible who do not be- 
lieve in anything else? For while we rest in 
the Bible, to the exclusion of any other testi- 
mony, the Bible itself declares most solemnly 
in favor of another Witness, to whom it appeals 
as an evidence of its own truth; and if we 
believe what the Apostles, speaking through the 



76 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

Gospel, tell us, we must also accept the authority 
to which they refer us, and to which they were 
referred by their Lord: " When the Comforter 
is come^ whom I will send unto you from the 
Father, even the Spirit of truth, which pro- 
ceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me. 
For He shall receive of mine, and shall show it 
unto you." * Now, if they who had been with 
their Master from the beginning, who were 
themselves appointed to be His historic wit- 
nesses, had yet need of a spiritual Witness, 
upon whose evidence and through whose spirit- 
ual monitions they were to receive their Lord 
more fully, and learn of Him more truly than 
they had yet done, how can we afford to dis- 
pense with its testimony ? If the facts were 
not enough for them, how shall the record of 
the facts be enough for us ? " It is the Spirit 
that beareth Witness " ; and so long as Belief 
is based, as might have been with the Apostles, 
on the evidence of the senses, or rests, as in 
the case of so many among ourselves, upon the 
written testimony of others, we are but receiv- 
ing the Witness of men, the Witness of God 
being greater : " And he that believeth hath the 
Witness in himself." 

Here, then, we find the point of departure 

* John xv. and xvi. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 77 

between US and the Apostles. Our belief, com- 
pared with theirs, is dead, formal, and historical, 
because they have attained to what we too often 
miss, — a point of union between the work 
done and the work doing. AVhile they rest in 
Christ's work, they rejoice in the Spirit's work, 
which is unto them the seal of its perfect ac- 
complishment in their hearts, — the earnest of 
grace, and the promise of glory. To them, the 
Word spoken from Heaven has been answered 
by the work wrought through its efficacy upon 
earth ; they have found all the promises of God 
in Christ Yea, and in Him Amen. Nothing 
has been declared which has not also been con- 
firmed. To the Yea of God — the let it be, 
and it was — spoken in our Saviour's accom- 
plished work of deliverance, of which, upon the 
Cross, He testified that it was finished, the 
Amen — so let it be — has been returned from 
the faithful soul, bearing witness to the salvation 
wrought within it through the power of the 
Yea. Therefore, while we are all doubt and 
hesitation, not knowing whether or not we may 
appropriate this privilege or claim this promise, 
the Apostles use the language of men who know 
the certainty of the things wherein they have 
been instructed. What they have seen and 
heard is their guarantv, as the Bible is ours, 



78 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

for the facts upon which their relations with 
God are founded ; and when they pass from 
these facts to their application to the individual 
soul, we find them no less confident, and this 
because they have received not only gifts, but 
with them that which seems, in the case of any 
intelligent Being, essential to the true possession 
and use of 'them ; I mean the knowledge that 
they are our own. " We have received," says 
St. Paul,* " of the Spirit to knoiv the things 
which have been freely given us of God " ; and 
St. John testifies for himself and his converts,! 
that " an understanding has been given them 
both to know Him that is true, and they that 
are in Him that is true." 

As He that beareth record is true, so is He 
that beareth witness true also ; and having re- 
ceived the faithful and true Witness, God's 
testimony to His own Work, they would as 
soon think of doubting that which they had 
seen, the fact of our Lord's personal existence, 
as of doubting that which they have felt, their 
own personal interest in Him ; they would as 
soon think of calling their Saviour's merits in 
question, as of hesitating with regard to their 
own participation in them. That they are in 
Him, is a fact as clearly established as that He 

* 1 Cor. ii. 12. f 1 John v. 20. 



A PRESENT HEAVE X. 79 

is ; and this confidence has not been brought 
about, as we sometimes imagine, both as regards 
them and other eminent Christians, by way of 
any extraordinary Revelation, but is founded 
upon the evidence which, in the case of any 
merely natural event, we should esteem at once 
the simplest and the surest, — they know that 
the Work is wrought for and in them, simply 
because they experience its effects ; they feel 
that something has been brought about within 
their souls which could not have been accom- 
plished but by the presence of a power, the 
influence of an agency. Being conscious that 
it is not with them as it has been, they compare 
the affections, tempers, and desires they now 
experience with those which had possession of 
them while they yet walked in the darkness of 
the natural understanding ; they rest, in short, 
in a felt and experienced w^ork. 

And here I would draw attention to another 
deeply interesting fact, and wish to do so the 
more particularly, because when a view, how- 
ever scriptural, fails to obtain general reception, 
it is usual to charge it with being unreal, vision- 
ary, tending to no practical issue. It becomes, 
therefore, very important for us to observe that 
the Apostles, boldly as they speak for themselves 
and the Churches to which they ministered, 



80 A PRESENT HE A VEN. 

of conscious possessing, conscious partaking of 
Christ, never rest this possession and partaking 
upon sensations, impressions, visions, or revela- 
tions of the Lord (abundantly as in these last 
respects they had whereof to glory), but ground 
it upon the turning of the heart to God,* as 
evidenced in a renewed affection, a moral reno- 
vation, a spiritual change. They know that 

* Few Christians appear to have enjoyed such abounding, even 
overwhelming, manifestations of the Divine presence and favor, 
as fell to the share of the heavenly-hearted Brainerd. In youth 
he would pass whole days in the wild solitudes of the forest, in a 
state of ecstasy, in which he was insensible to the flight of time, 
to hunger, and every impression of an outward kind, and during 
the whole course of his ardent evangelic life, there were seasons, 
not unfrequent, of which, through the abundance of the revela- 
tions, he might have said, with the Apostle, that whether they 
were passed in the body, or out of the bod}', was known not to 
him, but God. Yet it is recorded that, " There was no sight of 
heaven in his imagination, with gates of pearl and golden streets, 
and a vast multitude with shining garments ; no vision of the 
book of life opened with his name written in it: no sudden sug- 
gestion of words or promise of Scripture, as then immediately 
spoken or sent to him, no new revelations, or strong suggestions 
of secret facts. But the way he was satisfied of his own good 
estate was by feeling within himself the lively actings of a holy 
temper and heavenly disposition, the vigorous exercise of that 
divine love which casts out fear." Also, on the subject of his 
missionary labors, he says : " I look upon it as one of the glories 
of this work of grace among the Indians, and a special evidence 
of its being from a Divine influence, that there has been till now 
no visionary notions, trances, and imaginations intermixed with 
those rational convictions of sin, and solid consolations which 
numbers have experienced, and might I have had my desire, there 
had been no appearance of anything of this nature at ally 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 81 

they are Christ's by the Spirit which He has 
given them, — a Spirit which, being like unto 
His own, works in their spirits a holy like- 
mindedness with their Lord. Without this, 
tibej might possess all gifts, and understand all 
mysteries, and yet be nothing. St. Paul's ex- 
perience works hope, and he knows that this is 
a sure and certain hope, a hope that maketh not 
ashamed, not because he has been caught up 
into the third heaven, and heard in paradise 
unspeakable words not lawful for a man to utter, 
but because the love of God is shed abroad in 
his heart by the Holy Ghost.* St. John knoivs 
that he has passed from death unto life, not 
because, being in the Spirit, he has seen and 
talked with angels and with One greater than 
they, but because he loves the brethren. f And 
just as in our Lord's outward ministry of Re- 
demption, the works that He did bore witness 
of Him that God had sent Him, so in His inner 
ministry of Sanctification do signs and wonders 
accompany them that believe. And, as in the 
case of our Saviour's miracles, the work of 
power bore witness to the presence of power, 
so is the presence of grace attested by the work 
of grace. In each case an appeal is made to 
something accomplished — evident — to be seen 

* Kom. v. 5. t 1 John iii. 14. 

4* F 



82 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

and known of all men. The Spirit as well as 
the Word says, " Believe that I am He, for the 
very works' sake," for the sake and on the testi- 
mony of love, peace, righteousness, and joy in 
the Holy Ghost. My works — in their way as 
manifest as the works of the flesh which they 
displace. " If I do not the works which none 
other can do, believe not that God hath sent 
me." 

It is the peculiar mission of the Holy Spirit 
to lead us into the knowledge and certainty of 
our happy estate in Christ, — a mission on which 
His name of Comforter seems founded. " In 
that day," says our Lord, speaking of the com- 
ing of Him for w r hose sake it was expedient 
that He himself should leave us, "ye shall know 
that I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in 
you " ; * and I think it is greatly because we do 
not strive after the realization of this promise, 
and seem, indeed (speaking generally), to have 
resigned even the expectation of its fulfilment 
within us, that our religion has become a heart- 
less, unreal thing, without grasp upon the truths 
it professes to embrace. 

I know that to speak of things heavenly, just 
as we should do of things earthly, on the ground 
of simple experience ; to testify to a Saviour's 

* John xiv. 20. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 83 

love as something which has been felt ; to re- 
joice in conscious pardon, conscious renewal, 
conscious acceptance in the Beloved, is to trans- 
ss the limits of that conventional acceptation 
of the Gospel to which Christians are satisfied 
to restrict themselves. Such views, it is said, 
are likely to lead to error and self-deception. 
In short, they are dangerous, — a word which, 
being used for the purpose of dismissing the 
subject summarily, is not accustomed to wait 
for an answer, or one might be readily found 
for it in the fact, that there is no one doctrine 
of the Gospel, not even excepting those which 
are most essential to salvation, which may not 
prove, and has not proved, dangerous, when 
forced into undue prominence, by being taken 
in isolation from other truths of kindred impor- 
tance. Besides, in this case we are not the 
judges. An inquiry raised upon any point upon 
which God has been pleased to reveal Himself 
in the inspired Word, must not proceed upon 
merely prudential grounds. The question is not, 
Is this (according to our own notions) a safe 
view of the subject ? but, Is it the scriptural, 
the true one ? Can we deny it without depriv- 
ing a large portion of Scripture of its meaning 
and coherency, or ignore it without numbering 
ourselves among those who handle the Word of 



84 A PRESENT HEAVEN 

God deceitfully, and draw on themselves a real 
danger, even the judgment pronounced against 
those who " diminish aught " from His invio- 
lable testimonies ? I do not — understand me 
well — mean to say, that faith, in order to be 
sincere and saving, must necessarily reach the 
measure of the confidence I have been speaking 
of. The song of holy trust and triumph in 
God, which none but the redeemed can learn, 
is most truly u & song of degrees " ; and a faith 
which effectually secures participation in the 
merits of our Lord may yet come short of the 
faith which assures of that participation. I 
would only urge, that this clearer perception 
should, upon the testimony of Scripture, be 
believed in as a possible attainment, and then 
prayed for, striven for, lived for ; for the holy 
gift of assurance is the reward, as an old divine 
expresses it, of " exact walking " : it is a treas- 
ure imparted only to those who keep faithfully 
the good things committed to their charge. It 
is God's usury upon His own money. 

We should at least, as you say to me in one 
of your letters, expect the fulfilment of our Re- 
deemer's so often repeated promise, — the reward 
of faith and obedience,* — that He would mani- 

* Our Lord's answer to the question of Judas (John xiv. 22, 23), 
taken with the many other sayings in which He makes the abid- 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 85 

fest Himself to His people after another manner 
than He does unto the world. Believing this 
promise, should we not be urgent after its ac- 
complishment, in that spiritual revelation of 
Christ, which is to the faithful soul the perform- 
ance of the things in which it has believed on 
the evidence of the outward word ? As no 
man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he 
to whom the Son will reveal Him, should we 
not pray that the Father may in the Son be 
manifested towards us more and more, as noth- 
ing short of the sweetness of such a disclosure 
can en^ao;e our hearts to love and serve Him 
with that perfect love which casteth out fear,* 

ing in His love, and in that of the Father, dependent on the keep- 
ing of the commandment, places obedience before us in a light in 
which, I think, we have need to consider it more fully than has 
been yet done. I mean as being a direct means of grace, a way 
wherein, as by prayer and the other divinely-appointed ordi- 
nances, we approach unto God, and draw out our souls after 
Him; as a tree, while it lives by its root, breathes and feeds it- 
self through every leaf which the root nourishes. Many disputes 
have been raised among men as to the difference between faith 
and obedience. It is probable they are identical with God, to 
whom obedience, that part of our life in Him which is seen, and 
faith, the part which is unseen, are alike open and manifest. It 
is evident that an action performed or refrained from, with a ref- 
erence to the Divine pleasure, is as eloquent unto God as a prayer 
or thanksgiving, and as likely to be answered by Him with bless- 
ing. For to the eye of love, the deeds and gestures that express 
it are as intelligible as its spoken words, and no less acceptable 
and sweet. 
* St. Bernard. 



86 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

" which feels not the burden of the day, which 
counts not the cost of the labor, which works 
not for wages, being itself the most powerful 
motive of action " ? And in urging these ques- 
tions,! am less occupied with w r hat 1 believe to 
be necessary to the salvation of our souls, than 
with what I know to be essential * to their com- 
fort. It is upon the Saviour's work, and not 
upon the Spirit's witness, that salvation depends. 
Yet they are the happiest Christians w r ho, while 
they rest in the Day of Redemption, rejoice in 
that whereby they are sealed unto it, w r ith joy 
unspeakable and full of glory. Fqr without the 
witness of the Comforter we can know nothing 
of love, and joy, and peace in believing, as 
these happy and holy affections depend for their 
existence and support upon evidence which it is 
His office to impart. Without the security which 
this communicates, there can be no sweetness in 
love, no foundation for joy, no possibility of 
peace ; and until we receive this witness we 
must live, as so many of us are content to do, 
a starved life, joyless, unloving, unassured, as 
unworthy of the privileges in which Christianity 
places us, as it is of the glorious prospects to 
which, on the w r arrant of those privileges, it 
conducts us. " To them that believe, Christ is 

* See Note G. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 87 

precious." How comes it, then, that we are 
content to rest the great matter of our personal 
interest in Him upon evidence that would not 
satisfy us in the case of any temporal possession, 
— far less so in that of any earthly affection, — 
content to remain without the tokens of His 
presence, without the marks of His love, with- 
out the consciousness of His indwelling and 
abiding?* Christ has given Himself for us, 

* To return again to this saying, M If a man love me, he will 
keep my words, and my Father will love him; and we will 
come unto him, and make our abode with him," — do they not 
attach an unspeakable present reward to faith and obedience, a 
prize only to be attained through their joint exercise, though 
freedom and acceptance may be won, as by the thief on the cross, 
through faith alone ? Well may this be called the prize of our 
high calling, if it were possible to express in words what that 
prize is, — what that promised manifestation, — what that habitual 
indwelling, — we might hope to win more of our fellow-creatures 
to strive for it ; but it is among the things which it is not lawful 
(possible?) for a man to utter. There is something in this which 
word* — even though, like these of Christ's, they be spirit and 
they be life — can never fully express. It is a revelation made 
by degrees to those who seek it, by a close and humble walk 
with God, in prayer and in the keeping of the commandment. 
Many sincere Christians, doubtless, fall short of it. Many, in- 
deed, know not that there is such a prize, and have but faint per- 
ceptions of anything to be striven for beyond what they already 
possess. It seems to me that there is a treasure hid in such say- 
ings as these, "I will manifest myself unto him," " we will make 
our abode with him," which few among us even guess at. We 
read the words as we might walk over the turf under which there 
is hidden gold. It is a great matter, however, to have been made 
aware of the existence of the treasure, though we may as yet 
have made small way towards taking possession of it. — J. E. B 



88 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

yet we do not know whether He is our own or 
not, and we are content to remain in uncer- 
tainty. Yet the Good Shepherd, speaking of 
the sheep for whom He laid down His life, 
and for whom He has taken it again, says, " I 
know my sheep, and am known of mine," — the 
Church, for which Christ died, and for and in 
which He even now liveth, has One within her 
that uses no hesitating language. The Spirit 
has spoken for the Bride, " My beloved is mine, 
and I am His." Where there is uncertainty, 
there will be all that coldness and indecision 
which has rendered the epithet of the Saxon 
king, " the Unready," so mournfully appropriate 
to Christians in general. We are weighing our 
claims when we ought to be urging them, prov- 
ing our armor when we ought to be fighting in 
it, seeking our Lord, when firmer, truer spirits 
would be saying, " I have found Him whom my 
soul loveth," and this because we have not been 
careful to pierce into the blessedness of that 
" mystery" of devout consolation, without which 
prayer sinks into an exercise, obedience into 
taskwork, and the sacraments are degraded into 
a symbol, — Christ in us, the Hope of glory. 

And if Christ be indeed within us, if we 
are truly among the number of those who love 
His appearing, we shall not long remain without 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 89 

a sign of it ; it being as natural for Him to im- 
part an evidence of His favor, as it is for the 
human soul to require it. " What sign showest 
Thou ? " the Jews asked of Him upon earth, a 
question only made objectionable through the 
cavilling spirit in which it was uttered, for it is 
necessary to the mind of Man, and a part of its 
reasonable nature, to seek to establish itself in 
the certainty of whatever it would fain confide 
in as true, or rest in as desirable. Wherever 
interest may be excited or affection awakened, it 
will demand some evidence, suitable to the nature 
of the object concerned, to show that the affec- 
tion is reciprocated, the interest assured ; and I 
think in the case of our dearest interests we are 
much the losers, by not acting as simply as we 
should do in any affair of common life, and seek- 
ing for the proof of our acceptance ' with God, 
exactly where God has bid us look for it. No 
man, says our Lord Himself, can do the works 
of God, except God be with him ; and His 
Apostle * repeats the same truth in another 
form of words when he makes the keeping of 
the commandment a signf unto ourselves, an 

* And hereby we do know that we know Him, if we keep His 

commandments Whoso keepeth His word, in him verily 

is the love of God perfected ; hereby know we that we are in Him. 
(1 John ii. 3, 5.) 

t A sign so sure, so deeply satisfactory in its nature, that I 



90 A PRESENT HE A VEN. 

evidence of our standing in that grace through 
which alone it can be performed. While some, 
therefore, altogether ignore the witness of the 
Spirit, and others place it in something vague 
and intangible, an enthusiastic feeling, an ele- 
vated impression, which they are dissatisfied if 
they do not find, and finding, scarcely know 
whether this is indeed what they have sought 
or not, the testimony of God stands sure where 
He has placed it. In the witness of affiliation, 

sometimes find it hard to understand why we should ask for any- 
other. I feel a sort of surprise in hearing Christians expressing 
a desire for the restoration of the Church's miraculous gifts, or 
wishing, as individuals, for visible answers to prayer, or other 
sensible consolations of the Spirit. It seems so plain, that the 
remaining faithful to Divine grace in that which is least — say 
j in being able to maintain a truly loving temper under unjust 
provocation — is a fuller, more intimate evidence of continuance 
in God's love, than would be shown in the power of raising a 
dead body to life, or even in that more coveted power of being 
employed by God to raise up a dead soul. " For rejoice not that 
the spirits are made subject unto you, but rejoice rather that 
your names are written in Heaven." Let us rejoice in that we 
are accepted and renewed in Christ, who has also given us the 
earnest of His Spirit, making us of one heart, one way with Him, 
to show us that we are indeed His. 

Covet earnestly the best gifts. The passive graces, patience, 
meekness, self-abnegation, these are the miracles of the New Cov- 
enant. While many of the active virtues are merely the natural 
energies transfigured and changed into a higher likeness, — the 
earthly made to bear the image of the heavenly, — these are most 

truly 

" Unfed by Nature's soil." 

Their root itself is in Christ, and in Him is their fruit found. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 91 

given in the Spirit of grace and of adoption, 
whereby, in the conversion of the heart unto 
God, we cry unto Him, Abba, Father ; in the 
witness of assimilation, given in the mind re- 
newed after Christ's likeness, in righteousness 
and true holiness, after the Image in which it 
was first created. 

And here I might quit a subject which it is 
impossible to exhaust, were it not that I desire 
to explain myself more fully upon a point con- 
nected with it, upon which, as yet, I have only 
touched incidentally. I feel that few Christians 
will agree in what I have said, upon our equality 
with the Apostles in respect of privileges and 
capabilities in Christ, and we are slow to believe 
in this equality, or to admit the scriptural infer- 
ences on which it is founded, from a disposition, 
very common, I think, among us, to look upon 
the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit as being 
something greater and more Godlike than its 
ordinary graces : yet it does not require a very 
deep examination of Scripture* to prove that 
the sanctifying grace still enjoyed by the Church, 
and which can never depart from it, is a richer 

* We see that the disciples of our Lord had received from Him 
wonder-working powers at a time when St. John expressly tells 
us (chap. vii. 39) that the Holy Ghost was not yet given. Yet 
the Seventy could then return with joy, declaring that the devils 
were subject to them. Compare also with this the twelfth chapter 



92 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

and more heavenly gift, containing in it a fuller 
participation in the Divine nature, than the mi- 
raculous gifts granted to the Apostles, in order 
to promote its first establishment. For it is evi- 
dent that these last may be possessed, as in the 
case of Balaam, and many other persons in- 
stanced in the Old and New Testaments, with- 
out that vital union of the soul with its Maker 
which is essential to the communication of the 
latter. Balaam saw the vision of the Almighty, 
and beheld the star arising out of Jacob, but the 
Day-star, as Edwards * observes, never arose in 
his heart, — he had an outward revelation, but, 
no spiritual discovery of Christ. His knowl- 
edge, being exterior only, wrought no moral 
change within, and, in the midst of extraordi- 
nary mental illumination, he remained an infidel 
at heart, even while enjoying an outward com- 
munion with the God whom he neither loved 
nor honored, nor, except by constraint, obeyed. 
The case of this man may be considered in 
some degree exceptional, because, under both 
Covenants, the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit 

of First Corinthians, where St. Paul, after enumerating the vari- 
ous extraordinary gifts then enjoyed by believers, concludes by 
saying, " Yet show I unto you a more excellent way," and goes 
on to unfold the nature of a grace, — even charity. — See Wes 
ley's Thirty-ninth Sermon. 

* Edwards on the Religious Affections. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 93 

have been in general accompanied by a measure 
of grace in proportion ; but other instances * are 
not wanting to show that these occasional influ- 
ences of the Holy Ghost are not necessarily at- 
tended with that communication of it through 
which we become partakers of the Divine Na- 
ture, — a communication as far transcending 
them as the permanent exceeds the temporary, 
or the essential surpasses the merely accidental. 
An over-estimation of the extraordinary work- 
ings of the Spirit — sometimes manifested in an 
uneasy anxiety for their recall — betrays that we 
have not yet arrived at a due appreciation of its 
crowning work, the imparting of its own nature 
to the human soul, to which these outward en- 
dowments subserved merely as means to an end. 
And here we shall do well to bestow some 
thought on a wonderful and little understood 
text, f " He that believeth on me, the works 

* Instances such as those of Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, and 
Saul, men of irregular lives and unconverted hearts, yet spoken 
of as being, at certain times and upon extraordinary occasions, 
under the immediate influence of the " Spirit of God," are enough 
to prove that a temporary delegation of God's power can be be- 
stowed, without imparting that communication of His Nature 
which is inseparable from the lowliest operation of Sanctifying 
grace. The New Testament furnishes an eminent example of 
this in the case of Caiaphas, who, being High-Priest, prophesied, 
in virtue of his office, of the glory of Him whom he was even 
then taking counsel to destroy. 

f John xiv. 12. 



94 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

that I do shall he do also, and greater works than 
these shall he do, because I go unto my Father." 
In these words, " the works that I do," our 
Saviour alludes to His visible miracles exerted 
in the Kingdom of Nature, and exhibiting His 
rule and sovereignty over it. These, in splen- 
dor and variety, were never surpassed by the 
Apostles ; and as the degree of power over 
material things which the Lord of Nature was 
pleased to delegate to His first servants was not 
long continued to the Church, it has become 
evident that the outward Signs and Tokens 
which accompanied the founding of our Saviour's 
Empire on earth do not form part of the econ- 
omy by which that empire is sustained, and that 
it is not in the Kingdom of Nature, the kingdom 
without us, that we are to look for the fulfilment 
of the promise. It is, therefore, in Christ's other 
kingdom, even the Kingdom of Grace within us, 
and in the greater works that belong to it, that 
we must expect to see its abundant realization. 
Here, through the Spirit of God, acting with 
Man's spirit in the sphere of ordinary Christian 
exertion, the blind may still receive their sight, 
the lepers be cleansed, the spiritually dead be 
raised to life ; and why are these works greater, 
inasmuch as spirit transcends matter, than any 
outward miracle even now possible ? Why are 



A PEESEXT HE A VEX 95 

all things, falling within these boundaries that 
God hath appointed, possible to him that believ- 
erh ? Because, saith our Lord, I go to my Father ; 
go to receive gifts for men, yea, even for the re- 
bellious, that the Lord their God may dwell 
among them ; — go to make and to keep open a 
Highway for the people whom I have redeemed; 
go to pray for them, to strengthen them, to pro- 
vide them with an indwelling Comforter, — the 
Spirit of Truth and of Peace, the Spirit of Wis- 
dom and Revelation, the Spirit of Love and of 
Power. If ye loved me, or yourselves in me, 
ye would rejoice, because I go unto the Father. 

Until, therefore, it is proved that the Son is 
now less present with the Father than when He 
first ascended up to Him, the Spirit less present 
with the Church now than when it was at first 
bestowed, it seems difficult to discover what ad- 
vantage, as regards the things that belong to life 
and godliness, the primitive age possessed over 
our own, or upon what grounds we accustom 
ourselves to contemplate the piety, zeal, and love 
of the first Christians, as we might look upon 
some old master- work in painting or stained 
glass, — an excellence rather to be marvelled 
at than attained to. Yet we have no need to 
envy their privileges and endowments, only to use 
our own. They were in possession of no secrets 



96 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

to which we have not now the key ; and if we 
knew what the true Gift of God is, and felt in 
how much all of an outward kind that even He 
has to bestow upon us, is exceeded by that ac- 
cess to His Presence and union with His Na- 
ture, which it lies within the faithful acceptance 
and use of our ordinary Christian privileges to 
impart,* we should confess that they who have 
the Giver have all, and need not mourn over the 
withdrawal of any particular gift. We regret 
the things which have been taken away, chiefly 
through our imperfect recognition of the things 
which remain. Though miracles, tongues, and 
prophesyings have ceased, " now abideth" Faith, 

* " One standard of life" says Neander, " applies to all Chris- 
tians; the difference, as regards the reception of God's truth, be- 
tween the inspired Prophet and the ordinary believer is one of 
degree, not of kind." 

And it is surely very instructive to observe how much stress 
the Apostles lay upon that which is general, how little upon that 
which is peculiar, in their own position in Christ, — how simply 
they place their converts just where they stand themselves. As 
men before whom a great work has been set by God, they know 
that they have been endowed by Him with eminent gifts and 
graces, and to this St. Paul occasionally testifies with devout 
thankfulness, as when he magnifies his office. Yet even such an 
office seems but a small thing to one who, being joined unto the 
Lord, knows what it is to be of one Spirit with Him and His. 
" There are diversities of operations, but one Lord.'* It matters 
little whether a member's office appears more or less honorable, 
whether he be foot or hand, so long as he is of the Body, living on 
its fulness, and growing with its growth. " And we," says St. 
Paul, " are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones." 



A PRESENT HE A VEX. 97 

Hope, Charity;* and how much, inasmuch as 
the moral is more noble than the material, is a 
v better than a gift ! How much does the 
House, even Sanctification, or the renewal of 
man's body, soul, and spirit unto God, exceed 
in glory that by means of which it was builded ! 
The outward exhibitions of God's providence 
are like the strong wind which rends the moun- 
tains, — like the earthquake and the fire, they 
declare His Majesty and Awfulness, they show 
us that the Lord passes by,f but He Himself 
is in the still small voice. 

God Himself is there. Does not the knowl- 
edge of this, in the fact that the Almighty, in 
the communication of the Holy Spirit, imparts 
His own nature to the human soul, wonderfully 
extend and deepen the sense of our spiritual re- 
lations with Him, and give a yet fuller meaning 
to our Lord's saying, " Whatsoever ye shall ask 
in my name, believing, ye shall receive " ? 

Believing, ye shall receive all things, even God 
Himself. For even as earthly fathers, of such 
things as they have, give good gifts unto their 
children, even so will our Heavenly Father, 
because He can bestow nothing greater, impart 
Himself to those in whom in His one beloved 
Son He is well pleased. God, who so loved the 

* 1 Cor. xiii. f 1 Kings xix. 

5 G 



98 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

world that He gave His only begotten Son to 
die for it, that the world through Him might be 
saved, communicates through the Spirit that 
love which was manifested in the Son ; * and 
this communication is set before us in Scripture 
as the great object of prayer — may we not say 
that it is the final object of all prayer, the ful- 
ness of the blessing of the Gospel St. Paul 
spoke of, making its every gift and promise our 
own ? And if the gift — that which our Heav- 
enly Father will give to them that ask Him — 
is the object of all prayer, is not its increase — 
that which He will make to abound more and 
more in them that serve Him — the object of all 
endeavor? While from him that hath not — 
from him who possesses not that which is his 
own — shall be taken away, gradually perhaps, 
but surely, even that which he hath, until the 
light that is in him, his portion of the true light 
which lighteneth every man that cometh into 
the world, is turned into darkness, — " To him 
that hath shall be given, and he shall have 
abundance." He shall receive of gifts without 
measure as they are without price. He shall be 
satisfied with the plenteousness of God's house, 
and shall drink of its pleasures as out of the 
river : u Eat, O friends ; drink, yea, drink abun- 
dantly, O beloved." 

* 1 John fv. 9. 



IV. 



THE GOSPEL RECEIVED PROPHETICALLY. 



" Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven ? that is, to bring 
Christ down from above. " — Rom. x. 6. 




ftSftMONG the truths which Revelation 
makes known to us, there are some 
which so directly approve themselves 
to our human consciousness, so meet 
its inner wants, so satisfy its upward aspirations, 
that the soul, cheered by the sunshine they cast 
round them, is apt to repose in it with a too ex- 
clusive complacency. And among these divine- 
ly established facts I know not one to which the 
heart of Man, wounded by the sorrows, and 
wearied w^ith the troubles of the present life, 
has responded with a wider or more universal 
consent than has been accorded to the scriptural 
testimony upon which the happiness of the dead 
who die in the Lord is established. To the 
Voice which has proclaimed them " blessed,'' 



100 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

the Spirit has made answer in a "yea" as fer- 
vent as earth ever sent back to heaven. 

u Yea, it is well with them, their course is finished, 
For them there is no longer any future." 

We know that they have passed into a state, 
waiting for whose perfection, not only we, who 
have the First Fruits of the Spirit, but the 
whole of God's natural creation, groan and trav- 
ail together in pain, — a state wherein they know 
even as they are known, and love even as they 
are loved, — a state wherein they have arrived 
at that full " apprehension" of Christ which His 
most favored servants upon earth have confessed 
that they must still reach after. Yet I think, 
while it is impossible in thought or word or 
prayer to dwell with too much delight upon the 
coming in of that which is perfect, we should be 
careful in doing so to remember that the Prom- 
ise of the Future, fondly as we are inclined to 
rest upon it, is simply contingent upon that 
which it only seems to exceed in glory, — the 
unspeakable gift vouchsafed to us in the Pres- 
ent. We must not allow a shadow, although 
it be the shadow of good things to come, to 
eclipse, even for a moment, the substance of good 
things already obtained. The promise grows 
out of the gift ; and that gift is " Christ in us," 
out of which the hope of glory, its exceeding 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 101 

and eternal weight, unfolds by way of natural 
development. 

" He that hath the Son hath life " ; — a deep- 
ened sense of this truth would work within us a 
dissatisfaction with the vague impressions which, 
upon many points connected with death and the 
future state, have too much taken the place of 
Gospel realities among us. In explaining what 
I now mean, I need only draw your attention to 
the manner in which, in those unpremeditated 
expressions which reveal our real sentiments far 
more clearly than any guarded statement of 
opinion, we are accustomed to refer to the sepa- 
ration of the soul and body. As Christians we 
permit ourselves, upon this awful subject, to use 
language strangely inconsistent with our name 
and profession, — language which, if reduced to 
its true sense and value, would go far to make it 
appear that we had chosen death, not Christ for 
our Saviour, and which, even under every al- 
lowance for the vagueness of popular expression, 
betrays an ignorance of the nature and condi- 
tions of spiritual life, that leaves us, in the very 
heart of our Christian privileges, in a sort of 
Jewish Estate, wherein, as if unsatisfied with 
Him who is already come, we seem to be yet 
looking for another. Nothing is so common as 
to hear Death spoken of as the entrance to a 



102 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

better life,* nor is it unusual even from the pul- 
pit to listen to expressions which imply that the 
soul, so long as it remains united to its weaker 
partner, must inevitably partake of its imper- 
fection, to a degree which draws its capacity for 
spiritual attainments and enjoyments within very 
narrow limits. 

True it is that so long as we continue in the 
body we have yet to wait for that body's full re- 
demption,! anticipating which the natural crea- 
tion and the regenerated spirit of man groan 
together, " being burdened." The " earnest ex- 
pectation" even of the natural heart impels it to 
hope and onward looking, far more does that of 
the renewed nature urge it upon the thought of 
final deliverance from a bondage yet not wholly 
broken, a contradiction yet not fully overcome. 
He that is dead is freed from sin. Yet we must 
never forget that not only Immortality but Life 
has been brought to light by the Gospel, and we 
ought jealously to guard against whatever tends 
to invest it with a promissory, and, so to speak, 
prophetic aspect, by transferring its cardinal 
benefits to a future period and remote scene of 
existence ; and thus, by implication, deprives the 
meritorious satisfaction of our Saviour — the One 
Foundation upon which Scripture authorizes us 
* See Note H. | Romans viii. 23. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 103 

to build up our whole spiritual life — of the na- 
ture of a real and effected work.* When we 
look to Death to admit us to privileges which 
are already conferred upon us in the blood of 
reconciliation, we imply that this full, perfect, 
and sufficient Sacrifice, like the Legal offerings 
which prefigured it, does not contain within it 
that which can make the comers thereto perfect. 
We take the Key from off the shoulder of the 
true Eliakim, " who openeth and no man shut- 
teth," whenever we look to death to subdue, as 
by some magical process, an enmity which Christ 
has already taken away, and to effect a reconcil- 
iation which, by One offering, He has perfected 
forever. When we speak as if we expected a 
merely natural event, such as the dissolution 
of our bodily forces, to exert some mysterious 

* Wherever there is a transference of the Blessings of the 
Gospel to a Future time, as wherever there is a limitation of 
them in the Present, there exists, as I observed in my Second 
Letter, an unsuspected disposition to bring down the Atonement 
from a Reality to a Type, — to reduce it from something done, to 
something merely foreshown and promised. Yet it is not, like 
the Patriarch, " in a figure," that the Christian must receive that 
Lord, who, when he ascended up on high, and led captive our 
Race's long Captivity, received for us men, not promises, but 
gifts. As He that dwells among us is alive forevermore, so are 
all the benefits included in His Work and in His Abiding, real, 
living, and immediate, and the Blessings of the New Covenant, 
of which He is the Minister, are in the strictest sense as temporal 
— that is, as surely our own in this present life — as were the 
Blessings of the Elder one. 



104 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

influence upon the relations on which the life of 
the soul depends, we only prove that we have 
not yet, even in thought, probed to the deep- 
sunken foundation of all spiritual vitality. We 
betray the same confusion of spiritual with nat- 
ural existence, and the same inability to distin- 
guish between each in its separate province, 
which made Nicodemus ask, when urged to en- 
ter into a new and higher life, u How can a man 
enter a second time into his mother's womb, and 
be born ? " Our Lord's answer places the dis- 
tinction in the clearest light : — 

" That which is born of the flesh is flesh. 
That which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Mar- 
vel not, therefore, that I said unto thee, Ye must 
be born again." 

" That which is born of the flesh is flesh," — 
a natural process is sufficient for a natural end, 
but it can go no farther. A spiritual operation 
demands for its accomplishment a spiritual en- 
ergy. As none can enter into God's natural 
kingdom, or partake of the life which belongs to 
it, without passing through the appointed channel 
of natural birth, so is it, by analogy, with every 
one that is born of the Spirit. None can enter 
into the kingdom of grace, or become a partaker 
of its spiritual life, but by means of the processes 
and conditions upon which it has been made to 



A PRESENT HE A VEX. 105 

depend. To set these two states of existence — 
the life through which man becomes a living 
soul, and the life by which he is made a quick- 
ened spirit — clearly before us, — to see how, in 
the case of each one amongst us, they hold on 
their course, together yet distinct, — is to be 
aware that neither life nor death, nor any other 
creature, that is, any power or energy belonging 
to God's natural kingdom, can influence the 
spiritual relations to which our renewed exist- 
ence has been attached. With regard to the 
nature of this renewed life, the Scriptures have 
been most explicit, equally so as to the condi- 
tions by which it holds. They acquaint us with 
a state of beino- to be attained to, not through 
death, but through Him who hath overcome it, 
and opened for us the gate of everlasting life ; 
they unfold to us in its amplest particulars the 
character of this eternal life as revealed to us in 
the person of Christ Jesus, to whom alone it has 
been given to have life in Himself,* and from 
whom all our life is derived. They set this life 
before us in contradistinction to its true antago- 
ni-t, Spiritual death, or the alienation of the soul 
from God, and show us that it is from this death, j" 

* John v. 26. 

f When St. Paul, in the agony of his mental conflict, asks, 
Who shall deliver me from the body of this death, the law of sin 
which is in my members? he finds an answer in looking to a 
5* 



106 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

even the darkness and decay, the bondage of cor- 
ruption to which the natural heart is subject, 
that we must pass by spiritual regeneration into 
the life and liberty of the children of God. 
They speak plainly as to the conditions by which 
this life is attained to and supported : Faith in 
Him who hath obtained it for us. " He that 

spiritual change, not to a natural one ; " the law of the Spirit of 
Life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and 
death." He does not wait for the dissolution of the flesh to ob- 
tain freedom from the bondage of its corruption, but places his 
deliverance from it in Him who, coming in the likeness of sinful 
flesh, in that flesh overcame sin, and has given unto them that are 
in Him the power to overcome it, " even as He also overcame." 
We are apt to speak as if it were the natural body which sepa- 
rates the human spirit from its Maker. Yet it is not the flesh, but 
that which remains in it, the carnal mind at enmity against God, 
which constitutes the only true ground of alienation from Him. 
Many things may hide God from us, one thing only can separate 
us from Him, unresisted, unrepented sin ; and the flesh, though 
it may draw a veil between the soul and God's presence, that 
light unto which no man living can approach, can oppose no 
barrier between it and His favor. " They who are in the flesh 
caunot please God," by which expression it is evident, from what 
follows, St. Paul means, not the remaining in the natural body, 
but the continuing in the natural, unrenewed mind, for " Ye," he 
says, u are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the 
Spirit of God dwelleth in you." Our popular notions respecting 
death, and the prevailing disposition to connect the soul's per- 
fection with its separation from the body, seem based upon an 
unconscious Manicheism, which, supposing an inherency of evil 
in Matter, places it as the antagonist of God. We seem to forget 
that Christ is " the Saviour of the body," as well as the Re- 
deemer of the soul ; the Preserver and Sanctifier of the whole Na- 
ture, body, soul, and spirit, which, in being made Man, He took 
upon Himself forever. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 107 

believeih on the Son hath everlasting life. He 
that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but 
the wrath of God, the darkness and shadow of 
death, abideth on him." 

And here, I think, we have especial need of 
the work of the Comforter. When we have 
received the witness of the Spirit bearing wit- 
ness with our spirit that we are the children of 
God, and, if children, then heirs, our experience 
works hope, and gives us, as it were, ground to 
stand upon in heaven. They who have received 
the Earnest * know enough of the Inheritance, 
and of Him in whom they have obtained it, 
to see clearly that spiritual and eternal life are 
identical. All renewed life, being one with that 
of the Renewer, is one life ; the same life, 
whether its outward circumstances be more or 
less happy, — whether, in short, it be spent in 
heaven above, or upon earth below. And to 
speak of our present and our future life in 
Christ as being in any way separate from each 
other, is to draw a distinction which our Lord 
Himself is most careful to avoid. " He that 
believeth on me hath everlasting life." On this 
point, as you long ago observed to me, the very 
wording of Scripture is guarded ; there is no 
future employed, it is not " shall have," but 

* Eph. i. 14. 



108 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

u hath," — hath now everlasting life, — a life be- 
gun in Christ ; and over a life so begun, it is 
evident that no outward accident, such as the 
dissolution of the bodily organs, can exert any 
empire. When the breath of man goeth forth, 
he turns again to his dust. At the touch of 
death, the flower and grass of our natural life 
fall away and perish, but the Word of God, and 
that which is born of it, endureth forever. Our 
spiritual life lies in a region far removed from 
the influence of any natural event or change ; 
it is hid in Christ : and St. Paul proves how 
much our future life in Him is but the continua- 
tion and expansion of that which, even in the 
flesh, we live by the faith of the Son of God, 
when he says, " When Christ, who is our life, 
shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him 
in glory." 

The real life will then be also the visible and 
apparent one ; and in dwelling upon this, the 
manifestation of the sons of God, for which St. 
Paul represents the faithful as waiting in earnest 
expectation, we learn in what the true blessed- 
ness of death consists. Though it cannot, ac- 
cording to the popular phrase, admit us to a 
better life, it will give those who have already 
attained to the one life — the life which is in 
Christ Jesus — a better world wherein to live ; 



A PRESENT ILL A VEX. 109 

it will immeasurably extend and glorify the out- 
ward conditions under which the development 
of that life will proceed. Our present life in 
Christ may be compared to that of the seed ; a 
hidden life, contending underground against cold 
and darkness and obstructions, yet bearing within 
its breast the indestructible germ of vitality. 
Death lifts the soul into the sunshine for which 
a hidden, invisible work has prepared it. Heaven 
is the life of the flower. 

It is enough for the disciple that he be as his 
Master ; for the servant that he be as his Lord. 
Our present life in Christ is like the life which 
He lived upon earth ; a life harassed and tempt- 
ed, sometimes agonized, often sorrowful ; a life 
wherein He was not alone, because the Father 
was with Him ; yet a life which those who loved 
Him were none the less called upon to rejoice 
when He laid it down, and returned to the 
bosom of that Father's love. Our future life 
will be like that which He leads there. " Where 
I am, there shall also my servant be." While 
present with the body, we remain, in a natural 
sense, absent from the Lord. Our communion 
with Him is only spiritual, and therefore inca- 
pable of affording the fulness of content to a 
being endowed with both spiritual and natural 
faculties. It cannot be with us in the Taber- 



110 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

nacle * as it will be in the House. Here, one 
half of us groans, being burdened, waiting for 
the redemption of the body, the final swallowing 
up of mortality in life, which is the promised 
restitution of all things, admitting both body 
and soul and spirit into the glorious liberty of 
the children of God. No marvel, then, that 
they who can say with St. Paul, "to live is 
Christ," should with him also say, " to die is 
gain." No marvel that the soul which has tasted 
of the first fruits which are holy, should long to 
be where the lump also is holy. No marvel that 
the spirit should awaken within the regenerate 
soul a desire to depart and to be with Christ, 
that its inner consciousness should testify to the 
existence of something " far better" than is here 
to be enjoyed. " For he," saith our Saviour, 
speaking of the Comforter, " shall show you 
things to come." And in accordance with these 
words, whilst little in the direct letter of Scrip- 
ture has been told us of the mystery of future 
blessedness, much, in this great matter, has been 
shown us by way of a spiritual analogy, which 
testifies that the recreated world is in all re- 
spects foreshown and typified by the regenerate 
soul. In the mind renewed after the image in 
which it was first created, the Divine order is 

* 2 Cor. v. 



A PEESEXT HEAVEN. m 

already begun, — the key-note of the harmony 
to which God will in the end reduce all His 
works, is already struck. We often say that 
we can know at present nothing about heaven ; 
and are accustomed to quote in support of this 
a text which proves, when taken in connection 
with what goes before and follows it, that we 
know or may know a great deal. I refer to 
1 Cor. ii. 9, 10. 

" Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
have entered into the heart of man, the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love 
Him. 

" But God hath revealed them unto us by His 
Spirit ; for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, 
the deep things of God." 

These words, and those which follow in the 
twelfth verse, " Now ive have received of the 
Spirit which is of God, to know the things 
which have been freely given us of Him," and, 
indeed, the whole tenor of the chapter, make it 
evident that the Apostle is not looking beyond 
the time that now is. The mystery* with which 
his thoughts are occupied is the life of God 

* 1 Cor. ii. 7. — " We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, 
even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world 
unto our glory; which none of the princes of this world knew; 
for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord 
of glory." 



112 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

within the human soul, — that " preparation of 
the heart of man," wherein He reveals Himself 
after a manner not to be apprehended by out- 
ward sense, or recognized by natural perception. 
It is the heaven within us, and not the heaven 
above us, that the Apostles would here unfold 
to us : he is concerned, not with such things of 
God as we have yet to wait for, but with such 
as we have already received. " God," he says, 
" hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit." 

And we know much of heaven, if it be but 
in the initials and rudiments, wherein, in the 
lively characters of love, peace, joy, and devout 
conformity to His will, God's finger has traced 
it in the regenerate soul. We speak more truly 
than we are aware of when we say, as we often 
do, that we can form no idea of what heaven 
really is, until we arrive there. The regenerate 
soul is already in heaven, being by the indwell- 
ing of the Father, Son, and Spirit in possession 
of that which truly constitutes it. To be with 
God, in whatever stage of being, under what- 
ever conditions of existence, is to be in heaven. 
To be found in Him, a citizen of His lower 
kingdom of grace, is to possess that which gives 
His upper kingdom its glory ; for there, even as 
here, " a man's life does not consist in the abun- 
dance of the things which he possesses " ; and 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 113 

it is not either hearing or seeing, not either hav- 
ing or beholding, that can constitute its joy. 
The rainbow round about the throne, in sight 
like unto an emerald ; the sea of glass mingled 
with fire, the gate of pearl, the voice of harpers 
harping with their harps : — all these might be 
ours, without the capability of imparting a ray 
of genuine blessedness. They might pass away, 
yet heaven would not pass with them. For 
these are but the accidental properties of heaven. 
Its essentials consist in that without which these 
wonders and glories a thousand-fold repeated 
could convey nothing beyond a momentary grat- 
ification of the senses. And happiness, be its 
object earthly or Divine, resides in the corre- 
spondence between the inner need and its out- 
ward satisfaction : it is the answer to the soul's 
call, the accomplishment of its desire, the satis- 
fying of its yearning. " I beheld," saith St. 
John, " and a door was opened." Heaven is 
the opening of a door : it is the finding of a 
long-sought good, the renewal of a long-lost 
communion, the restoration to a favor which is 
in itself the fulness of joy. 

The Gospel has brought down Heaven into our 
souls ; God's message of reconciliation has plant- 
ed within us a germ, out of which He can mould 
at will a Universe of Blessedness. I think an 



114 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

unconscious Materialism mingles largely in the 
vague spirituality, or rather indefinitism, of our 
ideas with regard to our Future Life : we think, 
in a certain sense, too much of the palpable 
glories of Heaven, too little of that in which 
they consist. It is the Altar which sanctifies 
the gold, — the Presence of Him that dwelleth 
therein which consecrates the Temple. We 
must never, in our contemplations on this great 
subject, forget that not only hath He who buildeth 
the house "more honor than the house itself," 
but they also for whom it is builded. Yet we 
dc so, when, in favor of any of God's outward 
works, be it the Heaven which He hath made 
for Himself, or the Earth which He hath given 
to the children of men, we lose sight of His 
work within us, that crowning achievement of 
Almighty wisdom and infinite love, which it cost 
even God so much to bring to perfection. For 
the Heavens, which are God's throne, like our 
Earth, which is His footstool, were called out of 
nothingness by the simple exercise of the Divine 
energy. " He spake, and they were made ; He 
commanded, and they stood fast for ever." There 
was no pang here, no effort : what a word is to 
man, such is a world to God, the simple expres- 
sion of His thought. This visible Temple to 
God's praise and glory, the system of which our 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 115 

Earth forms part, rose like an exhalation out of 
the Sea of His fulness silently, or to such music 
as the morning stars, God's eldest-born, made 
when they sang and shouted together for joy. 

Thus was it with the work of Creation ; but 
Redemption, as the Psalmist tells us, " cost 
more " : the foundation of these outer Courts 
was laid in harmony ; but when God would re- 
pair their desolations, and raise up from the dust 
His ruined shrine within, it -was through the 
anguish of a wise and loving Master builder. 
Each one of the living stones whereof God's 
spiritual house is framed, bears upon it the dint 
of His travail, — that travail of the Soul whose 
sweat was blood. And now that the hands* 
of Him who laid the foundations of the reno- 
vated Temple have also finished it; now that 
the headstone thereof has been brought forth 
with shoutings of " Grace, grace," let us beware 
how we read History for Prophecy, and look to 
a future state for blessings w T hich are abundantly 
our own in our present one. To do so, augurs, 
as I have said, a secret distrust in the efficacy 
of the blood of reconciliation, sufficient to save 
those who come unto it, even to the uttermost, 
— sufficient for our sins, our sorrows, and our 
imperfection ; the blood of healing as well as ot 

* Zech. iv. 7, 9. 



116 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

Atonement ; the sign of freedom as well as of 
pardon, procuring us a present, and not, as we 
fondly imagine, a future restoration to God's 
favor, and making our souls in His sight, as 
the Disciples were made in the washing which 
prefigured it, " clean every whit." 

This, even our Lord's meritorious sacrifice, is 
the gate of the Lord, wherein we may even now 
enter and be glad, and that to which it conducts, 
the fulness of life and joy in Him, is the true 
heaven ; whether it be found in God's kingdom 
of grace below, " which is but glory begun," or 
in His kingdom of glory above, " which is but 
grace completed."* 

The soul, in uniting itself to Christ through 
a lively faith, enters of necessity into the imme- 
diate fruition of the fulness which is laid up in 
Him, — its immediate yet gradual fruition. The 
soul's true life has begun. Yet it has need to 
be nourished, need to be strengthened. It is 
not all at once made perfect in that love, which 
is, to speak truly, but faith grown to its fullest 
stature. For when faith has for its object a Be- 
ing " altogether lovely," it must turn to love in 
exact proportion with its own increase. To 
know Him better is to love Him more ; and to 
this knowledge and this love, it is plain that the 

* Archbishop Leighton. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 117 

mere passing out of one phase of existence into 
another can never admit us. It is not death 
but faith that must conduct us to heaven ; for it 
is faith only that can conduct us to love. Death 
may, indeed, admit to the immediate presence 
of the Almighty, but it is through faith and love 
that His presence is made unto us the fulness of 
joy. Without a spiritual acquaintance with our 
Maker, even in His light our souls would not 
see light. We might look upon our Saviour in 
His glorified form, as so many of old beheld 
Him under His human aspect, without seeing 
Him as He is ; and the touch which seals up our 
eyes to the things of earth cannot endue them 
with this spiritual insight. Death's cold hand 
cannot draw us nearer God : it is intrusted with 
no Gospel. His silent lips, though they may 
ofttimes bear on them God's kiss, are charged 
with no message of reconciliation. 

What we have made God to us in this world, 
we shall find Him in the after one ; for the out- 
ward heaven, think of it as w T e will, is but the 
consummation of that inward one already es- 
tablished in every heart, made through God's 
grace, in the communication of His Spirit, a 
"partaker in the Divine nature." It is the 
efflorescence of spiritual life in its fullest bloom : 
it is the permanent blossoming of the Christian 



118 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

graces, buds not wholly expanding here : it is 
love, joy, and peace made visible, made perfect, 
made perpetual. To the soul already renewed 
after God's likeness, it is but, in the words of 
the Psalmist, the " awaking up " to the blissful 
sense of a perfect assimilation. To the heart 
already reconciled with its Heavenly Friend, it 
is but the consciousness of happiness that has 
long been its own : it is only, as a saintly spirit 
has expressed it, a transference to the sunshine 
of our Father's sensible smiles, — a sunshine that 
has been upon it long. 

For happiness, let us understand this well, is 
as truly our portion here as above ; it cannot 
fail to fall within the lot of those who have 
chosen for their portion Him whose nature is 
One with infinite, unalienable Joy. God, in 
communicating Himself to the soul, of necessity 
communicates happiness ; and all sounds in 
union with Him have returned * to their central 
rest, and are happy in exact proportion to the 
closeness and fulness of their union, — happy, in 
other words, by so much as they have within 
them of God. The reconciled soul has, there- 

* Our very thirst after happiness, our very search for it through 
unworthy objects, is at once a proof of our descent from God, 
and a witness of our tendency towards reunion with Him from 
whom we came. See on this subject John Smith's Select Dis- 
courses. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 119 

fore, a right to be at all times joyful, because it 
possesses a solid, unalienable ground of hap- 
piness ; but this right it is not at all times able 
either to realize or to make good in this world, 
wherein the child, although he be heir of all, 
differs ofttimes not much from a servant, in re- 
spect of the things which he has to endure. 
Bodily and mental infirmities, imperfect views 
of the Divine character, above all, the lingerings 
of indwelling corruption (that which doth re- 
main within us, though it may reign no longer), 
rise like damps and mists to obscure the contin- 
ual irradiation which would otherwise, in the jus- 
tified soul, follow upon the simple consciousness 
of its own position. Joy is conscious happiness. 
We may possess the reality of happiness with- 
out the enjoyment of it ; we often do so in tem- 
poral things, being more rich, more beloved 
than we know of; and even thus with the soul 
it has already the rich reality, but it needs the 
fuller consciousness ; its acceptance is already 
complete, its union is already perfect, but of the 
fulness of this acceptance, the sweetness of this 
union, it seems as yet imperfectly aware. It 
seems, as you observe in your last letter,* inca- 

* " No one confessed more fully than St. Paul that he was 
complete in Christ now; yet he says, speaking of the future 
state, ' then shall I know even as I am known,' which shows, I 
think, that he saw Christ's work as regarded him to be perfect, 



120 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

pable, under its present conditions, of attaining 
to the perfect apprehension of the things for 
which, as St. Paul says, it has been already ap- 
prehended of Christ. 

Heaven is the perfect recognition, the com- 
plete reciprocation, of that Love from which 
neither things to come, nor things present, 
neither Death, nor, as so many among us seem 
to imagine, Life, can separate us. " Beloved," 
says St. John, " now are we the Sons of God ; 
and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, 
but we know that when He shall appear we 
shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He 
is." Heaven is the becoming conscious of an 
already-formed assimilation, the knowing as we 

but acknowledges that his own power of embracing it does not 
as yet equal that perfection, for he describes himself, in another 
place, as ' following after,' that he may apprehend, or lay hold of, 
that for which also he is apprehended of Christ. And here lies, 
I conceive, the difference between our present and our future 
state. On Christ's part, nothing further will be done or required, 
only we shall then be quickened to apprehend what has been done 
for us, — to lay hold of Christ, to see clearly and to know fully 
how fast He had hold of us from the beginning, even before we 
knew it ; and in this sense it seems to me our union after death 
must be more perfect than it can be before it. They to whom 
Christ is even now united in bonds that admit of no further per- 
fecting, will be awakened to the full consciousness of their union ; 
and it will be the difference between a mutual, living recognition 
and embrace, and a greeting in which one fully conscious draws 
to his bosom the fainting and half-conscious form of his friend.'' 
— J.E.B. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 121 

have so long been known. To the faithful Dis- 
ciples who walked with their Lord along the 
common track, it is but the taking up upon the 
Mount, and beholding Him, whom they have so 
long loved and followed, " transfigured before 
them." Faith and love are already at home in 
Heaven ; with all that will meet them there, 
they have already, under lowlier aspects, be- 
come familiar. If we know what it is to love 
God and to be beloved of Him, we shall no 
longer speak of Heaven as if it were a place of 
which we can at present know nothing. We 
shall not be content to let this good land, our 
purchased inheritance, float before us in misty 
outline, like Fortunate Islands lying far amid 
doubtful seas, and to be reached (if ever gained 
at all) after the hap of olden mariners, blown 
upon them by some propitious gale ; for few 
among us seem to be so sailing by line and com- 
pass, as to know whether we are going there or 
not. Yet whither I go, saith the Lord, ye know, 
and the Way ye know ; if ye know Me, neither 
the end nor the way can be unfamiliar. 

To acquaint ourselves with Christ is to be- 
come acquainted with Heaven. It is to be able 
to speak of it, as was said of a Saint of old, as 
of a place where we have already been, and 
from whence we have but returned upon an 



122 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

errand. There is no other possession which has 
been made our own with so much certainty, no 
other place of which, vaguely as we allow our- 
selves to speak of it, we really know so much. 
If we, indeed, know little about Heaven, it is 
only because we know little about God, and 
Jesus Christ in whom He is revealed ; for this, 
the true spiritual acquaintance with God, u is 
life eternal." Little, it is true, has been made 
known to us of the outward constitution of our 
future commonwealth, much has been imparted 
to us of its inward conditions, and this through 
experience, — good things given instruct us in 
good things prepared. Love that "prepares" 
Many Mansions for us, prepares us for what we 
shall find in them. We are so ignorant of the 
Divine economy which regulates our everlasting 
habitations, that the mere attempt to guess at 
what will be there our probable habits, pursuits, 
and occupations, involves us in a thousand diffi- 
culties and contradictions ; and yet, while we 
know not how we shall then live, we know in 
kind, if not in degree, how we shall then feel. 
Here, while the form and outline are strange to 
us, the imperishable essence is familiar : we can- 
not define either the shape or color of this, 
God's glorious Rose, we only know it through 
its fragrance, unfolding in the regenerate soul 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 123 

of man. We cannot paint this flower, yet love, 
and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost convey 
within our hearts a subtle sense of its odor, and 
instruct us in the highest secrets of Heaven. 

And I would once again ask in what, save in 
degree only, do the characteristics of renewed 
life, under its present conditions, differ from re- 
newed life under its future ones, — in what re- 
spect can they essentially vary ? Is it not the 
same life maintaining its identity under differ- 
ent phases and developments, just as an indi- 
vidual retains his personality, an affection its 
strength and sweetness, under outward circum- 
stances of the most varied and dissimilar char- 
acter ? There are few of us, perhaps, so en- 
tirely limited within the circle of the things 
that now appear, as not to have sometimes sent 
a thought across the visible horizon which bounds 
it, and asked if the world which lies beyond is, 
after all, even in its outward aspect, so totally 
unlike our present one as we are apt to imagine. 
Will they differ from each other more than one 
star differs from another in glory ? and are we 
not justified in presuming that, manifold as are 
the works of God, they are in all respects per- 
vaded by a certain harmony, the result of that 
wisdom in which He hath made them all ? 

Such questions, only Heaven itself, and the 



124 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

light which makes all things manifest, can an- 
swer ; though analogy can suggest much, it can 
determine little ; and on all points connected 
with the outward frame and constitution of our 
future life, the silence of Scripture leaves us 
little room to speak particularly : — but when 
we come to a question of far deeper practical 
import, and ask ourselves in how far, as regards 
that w r hich is within, our present life may re- 
semble the future one which grows out of it, 
these oracles of God give forth no uncertain 
answer. They acquaint us with a gradual 
moulding and fashioning, the work of no hu- 
man artificer, through which that which lies 
within us, as the statue lies within the rude and 
shapeless block, begins even here to assume 
the likeness in which it will hereafter attain its 
final beauty and perfection. When they speak 
to us of our deliverance from the power of 
darkness and our translation into the kingdom 
of God's dear Son, they set before us a state 
of being in which love to God is even here the 
governing principle of life, the mainspring of 
thought and action, as it is with them, His min- 
isters above that do His pleasure, and find in it 
their own ; a state in which the human will, 
like the angelic, attains to such measure of con- 
formity with the Divine law, that it follows on 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 125 

the direction of God's Spirit, in the unforced 
obedience, which, as the Prophet Ezekiel * wit- 
nesses, runs and returns as the appearance of a 
flash of lightning : " Whithersoever the Spirit 
was to go, thither was their spirit to go ; they 
turned not when they went." Our heavenly 
Master is not, as the slothful, unfaithful servant 
thought Him, " a hard man," commanding and 
expecting impossibilities. Whatever God tells 
us to do, He also helps us to do. Our Saviour, 
who knows whereof we are made, sends us on no 
vain errands, sets us upon no unprofitable tasks. 
Whatever He makes an object of prayer, is also, 
for that very reason, an object of attainment ; 
and He it is who hath taught and commanded 
us, when we pray, to say, — 

" Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." 

* Ezekiel i. 14. 



V. 



THE GOSPEL RECEIVED IMPLICITLY. 

" The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart ; for 

with the heart man believeth unto righteousness." — Romans x. 8-io. 




[N the preceding chapters we have 
been chiefly occupied with the recog- 
nition of Divine truth, but we now 
come to consider its reception in the 
heart, that measure and degree of faith which is 
less conviction than possession, being itself the 
substance of things not as yet seen. This faith, 
the soul's rich, unborrowed wealth, is not taken 
on trust from other men's minds, nor even from 
the words and promises of Scripture ; it is the 
spirit's grasp upon these very words, the heart's 
appropriation of these very promises, making 
them indeed our own. 

What Locke speaks of natural science holds 
especially true in spiritual life, " that a man 
only has as much as he really knows and com- 



A PEE SENT HEAVEN. 127 

prehends. What he believes only and takes on 
trust from the floating of other men's opinions 
(though these opinions may happen to be true) 
is but borrowed wealth, which, like fairy money, 
though it were gold in the hand from which he re- 
ceived it, will be but leaves and dust when it 
comes to use." Opinion holds truth in its hand, 
experience holds to it by the heart, and to ex- 
perience only is it given to work within the soul 
that intimate persuasion of God's love which 
raises it up to the victory which overcomes the 
world. A living faith is a loving faith ; how 
can it but believe in the love by which it lives ? 
It knows Him in Whom it has believed, and 
needs no other strength and wisdom than such 
a knowledge implies. It has ceased to con- 
fer with flesh and blood. For the allurements 
of sense, for the doubts of reason, for the as- 
saults of spiritual wickedness, it has gained one 
answer, 

" I have found Him Whom my soul loveth." 

" To know the love of God as it is in Christ, 
to trust in it, to resign one's self wholly to it, 
this is believing." But is this degree of belief 
easy ? is it even possible to man's unaided spirit ? 
Who that knows his own heart, its darkness, its 
bewilderments, its feebleness to good, will not 



128 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

be ready to join in the vehement language of 
the great Reformer, and exclaim,* " If any one 
could indeed believe, then for very joy he would 
be able neither to eat, nor drink, nor do aught 
else." Who that compares his heart with the 
picture of the renewed heart, as the pencil of the 
Holy Spirit has traced its clear, firm outline in 
Scripture, will be inclined to cavil at conversion, 
— to dispute as to whether it is in most cases 
sudden or gradual, initiative or complete, when 
he feels that in all cases it is needed? The 
Holy Spirit works upon what it finds, — the 
history of conversion varies with that of each 
individual soul ; thus, there are persons who 
need no repentance in the sense of a turning of 
the outward life, but in a deeper sense, even 
that of the renewing from on high, all need it. 
Conversion is the consent of the soul to God. It 
is the acceptance of Christ, and, with Him, of 
pardon, deliverance, freedom ; it is the with- 
drawal of the soul from its own objects to fix 
them upon those with which the doctrine of 
Christ presents it, and which the natural heart 
does not, cannot receive. Conversion belongs 
to the rationale of spiritual life ; it is a fact, at 
which, even if it were not revealed, were not 
insisted upon, in Scripture, the heart of man 

* Note I. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 129 

would arrive through its own unanswerable logic. 
Place these two side by side, man as he is by 
nature, and man as he is seen in Christ. Bid 
these two approach, resemble each other ; nay 
more, bid them unite, be joined to each other, 
not in a mere outward bond, but in spiritual 
affinity, as like meets like. Compare the dis- 
positions, the desires, the objects of the natural 
heart with those attributed in Scripture to the 
mind renewed after Christ's likeness. Is there 
resemblance here, is there even analogy ? If 
these two, contrary the one to the other, are 
indeed to be made one, is there not a miracle 
needed, a mighty spiritual and moral change, 
such as man has of himself no power to effect, 
— and yet a power to invite or to restrain, as 
miracles were invited or restrained of old, — a 
change which Scripture sets before us under 
many expressions, figurative it is true, yet de- 
scriptive of that which is itself as real as all 
that is alone real, because alone eternal, as real 
as man's misery, as God's mercy; as real as 
that Word, the expression of God's unchange- 
able purpose, which shall endure when Heaven 
and Earth shall pass away : 

" For as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be 
changed : 
" But thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail." 
6* I 



130 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

When the Apostles declare that, if any man 
be in Christ, he is a new creature, when they 
speak to us of being dead or alive in Christ, of 
putting on the man from Heaven, they testify , 
to a change, a passing out of one state into an- 
other, a transition as actual as that which takes 
place under what, in speaking of the things of 
daily life, we should express by a change of sit- 
uation, a change of feeling. And of this change 
the Apostles themselves are, as it were, the 
unconscious witnesses ; they know that they have 
passed from death unto life, know it far more 
fully than even they can express in words. 
They know it, not only for themselves, but for 
the weakest of their brethren ".yet without 
strength." The consciousness of " being in the 
Lord," partakers in the fellowship of His suffer- 
ings, in the power of His resurrection, bound 
up with Him forever in the bundle of life, runs 
like a thread of fire through all their writings. 
Even while they are unfolding statements of 
doctrine, or settling questions of morals, the hid- 
den flame breaks forth, the secret consciousness 
glows into open exultation, u Who shall separate 
us from the love of Christ?" Through the 
whole of some Epistles, — we may particularly 
instance the Ephesians and Colossians, — there 
is a perpetual rise and overflow of that deep and 



A PRESENT HEAVEN 131 

sober joy, which, alike in natural and spiritual 
things, wells but from one spring, the conscious 
possession of a good, ever present and all-satisfy- 
in cr to the heart. It is " in the Lord " that 
they rejoice and endure, labor and take rest, 
make war and triumph. Their very life, as 
they express it, is hid in Christ ; nothing that 
belonged to it, sin only excepted, is extinguished, 
all is transferred, — affections, interests, joys, 
and sorrows, these had a sweetness, a glory of 
their own, but it is now transfigured into a 
higher likeness ; all these earthly have been 
made to bear the image of the heavenly. Old 
things are passed out of the soul's life, 

" Behold, all things are become new." 

And sadness as well as joy has its intuitions. 
We — I speak of all faithful and mourning 
Christians — have been instructed through our 
very need in what the Apostles learnt through 
fulness ; poverty, distance, alienation, these states 
have also their deep experiences, bringing truth 
home into the soul. I believe in conversion 
because our Lord has said, " Except ye be con- 
verted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." 
I would believe in it, if He had not said this, 
because I know and feel within myself that I 
cannot enter it without such a change. There 



132 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

is mystery, but no marvel in the prophetic an- 
nunciation, " Ye shall not all sleep, but ye shall 
all be changed." Who shall enter upon a new 
Being without being fitted for it ? Does the 
butterfly soar without wings ? — long fashioned 
in secret, though they be long hidden. I claim 
a new heart and a new spirit, because God has 
promised them. I would claim them even if 
they had not been promised by God, because 
God has given me laws which I cannot keep, 
but with other aids, other light, other strength 
than that which Nature furnishes, — because he 
has given me promises exceeding great and pre- 
cious, which without these I cannot enter upon, 
cannot even desire. For how,* saith the Al- 
mighty, speaking to man at the mouth of His 
prophet, 

u Shall I place thee among sons, 
And give unto thee the land of Desire, 
The inheritance of the Glory of the Nations ? " 

Even by making us fit to enter upon the joy which 
He has prepared. "Thou, He says, shalt call 
me My Father, and shalt not turn aside from 
following me." 

The son's heart secures the son's portion, the 
inheritance is entailed upon the love. All that 
is won, all that is lost in spiritual life, is lost, is 

* Jeremiah iii. 19. 



.4 PRESENT HEAVEN. 133 

won through the heart.* Here it is, in the will, 
the intellect, the affections, in that which within 
us is human, distinguishing man as man from 
that which is simply animal and instinctive, 
that Christ has received a kingdom from His 
Father. When He comes into man's heart, 
into that which inquires, which reasons, which 
loves, which suffers, He comes unto His own, 
unto that which He has made His own through 
the closest ties of affinity, the deepest experien- 
ces of anguish. " Behold, He himself took our 
infirmities, and bare our sicknesses." He comes 
unto that which He alone understands in all its 
depths, its windings, its intricacies. 

One man may understand another man, Christ 
understands Humanity as a whole ; but how 
shall Humanity understand Him? How shall 
Man, even in his own limited measure, appre- 
hend that for which he himself has been appre- 
hended of Christ? When the intellect would 
lay hold on these overwhelming facts, — a fallen 
world, a manifested, suffering, dying God, a spir- 
itual Presence still living and working among 
us, — when it would strive to make these facts 

* Look diligently what thou lovest, what thou fearest, wherein 
thou rejoicest or art saddened, and under the rags of conversion 
thou wilt find a heart perverted. The whole heart is in these 
four affections, and of these I think we must understand that 
saying, Turn to the Lord with all thy heart. — St. Bernard. 



134 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

intelligible to itself, would endeavor to con- 
nect them with each other, they elude it , wi- 
dening with its grasp, they escape from it on 
every side. Hence is it that the strain, so to 
speak, of salvation, has not been laid by God 
upon our acquiescence in any minutely devel- 
oped theory, even of Truth itself, but upon 
love for one living Person, upon belief in one 
crowning act. 

Hence is it that, as earthly interests recede, 
and eternal verities press and advance upon the 
soul, the Cross comes into the solemn foreground 
of spiritual life, and that Prayer of Moses, the 
Man of God, becomes so frequent on Christian 
lips, show thy servants thy work ! Not that our 
saving interest in Christ depends upon the clear- 
ness of our spiritual vision, for it is with the 
heart man believeth unto righteousness, and the 
heart may be deeply influenced by the very 
work with regard to which its views remain 
confused and imperfect.* But the fuller creed 
makes the richer life ; if a little faith has an 
open door set before it which no man can shut, 
an ample faith sets our feet in the " large pas- 
tures " that lie beyond it. And as the grasp 
of faith tightens, its hold widens. If Christ 
could say, when one had but lightly touched 

* Note K. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 135 

the hem of His garment, " I perceive that vir- 
tue is gone out of me," if every spiritual ap- 
proach to Him be as the drawing forth of life 
and strength, flowing out from Him to us, how 
is it when Faith has made its great, all-inclusive 
seizure, when it has laid hold upon the Tree 
whose every leaf is given for the healing of the 
nations ? Fear not, ye who seek Jesus who was 
crucified. Other seekers, other followers, may 
after a while turn back and walk no more with 
Him, but they who have gone to Him that they 
may also die with Him, can never be offended 
by word or deed of His. 

It is the Cross that intensifies, that glorifies 
life, that opens up depth after depth in the Hu- 
man and in the Divine Natures, and bridges over 
the depths it has disclosed. Here only, at the 
foot of the Cross, can man really die, — here 
only, with his loving, his suffering Lord, can he 
lay down his life that he may receive it again in 
Him. And while the precepts of Christ are 
reformative, the death of Christ is regenerative ; 
it has cast a seed into the bosom of humanity, 
the germ of a new, ever progressive life, — a 
seed over which Christ himself watches, and 
whose expansion in the heart, the bursting of a 
heavenly midnight-blooming flower, is conver- 
sion. Faith in this great miracle makes all 



136 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

other miracles possible. Show Thy servants 
Thy work, and their own will be indeed easy, for 
" in the blood is the life." We go on asking, 
What shall we do that we may inherit eternal 
life? until, through the sudden shining of a 
light from heaven, or the gradual dawning of a 
day-star within our hearts, we learn that our 
part is to live, to die, in the strength of that 
which has been already done. " Let him lay 
hold of my strength, that he may make peace 
with me ; and he shall make peace with me." 

And it is remarkable that, until through the 
Spirit we feel Christ within us as one that is 
alive from the dead, the fact of His death seems 
to affect us but little. Though no sorrow was 
ever like unto His sorrow, it is nothing to those 
that pass by — a story often told — an accepted 
history. Only to those who believe is Christ 
precious, for they only know their Lord in the 
fellowship of His sufferings, in the power of 
His resurrection. They have looked upon Him 
w^hom they beforetime pierced, and He has 
looked upon them, — a mutual recognition has 
been exchanged. When Joseph makes himself 
known unto his brethren, their hard hearts are 
smitten. 

And not until then, — for true self-renuncia- 
tion, much as has been written and said about 



A PRESENT HEA VEK 137 

it, is not easy. No sight, short of that great 
one of Sacrifice and Love, can turn the heart 
from its own works, the many works through 
which the natural man will naturally seek to 
propitiate his Maker, to fix it upon the one work, 
through which the spiritual man is aware that 
his very imperfection is accepted. For all men 
seek and love their own ; the natural man 
cleaves to his own works and efforts, as being part 
of that body of self which no man ever yet 
hated ; and for this natural adhesion there is no 
escape save in rising to a state of being wherein 
frail, self-seeking mortality is swallowed up in a 
Divine life. Then being made partaker of a 
life in which Christ is his own, it becomes nat- 
ural, and, as it were, an instinct, to love and 
cleave to Him. It is the soul's natural life. 

The soul that has thus returned to its true 
gravitation * has done alike with task-work and 
with anxiety, has ceased from that sad complaint, 
" Thou hast left me to serve alone." It is no 
longer cumbered with much serving : no longer 
solicitous about its work, but about its life, the 
life of Christ within it, of which that work is 
but the blossoming and expansion. So long as 

* All things in nature are moved and brought to their proper 
place by their gravity, the light upwards, the heavy downwards, 
but the gravitation of the rational soul is love, the first and proper 
motive which inclines the will to its object. — John of Gech. 



138 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

it is planted beside that River of water, neither 
flower nor fruit will fail in their season. " He 
that abideth in me and I in Him, the same 
bringeth forth much fruit." 

For though it be possible, as appears from St. 
Paul's warning, for an unholy heart to obtain 
a perception of the salvation which Christ has 
wrought, such a perception will be ever unac- 
companied by any renewing, vivifying change 
of aim and of affection. The holders of the 
Truth in unrighteousness only hold it as a de- 
tached thing ; it has no hold upon them, nor 
root wherefrom to put forth its transformative 
energy. Even in Christ's light they do not see 
light, because they do not love it. Yet this 
barren, lifeless faith is not to be opposed, as has 
been sometimes attempted, by any doctrine of 
Works, dead, save in so far as they flow out of 
the fulness of the living Vine. This is to look for 
fruit from the tree of self, withered from its very 
root. From me, saith Christ, is thy fruit found. 
For dead faith and dead works there remains a 
common antidote, conversion, that living faith 
in a living Saviour which works within us a real 
change, f " so that we, beholding his glory, are 
changed from glory to glory, even by the Spirit 
vf the Lord" 

* Note L. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 139 

And it is evident that an inward change, a 
change in ourselves, is needed before we even 
can appreciate our Saviour's outward work. 
TJie dead bury their dead, the living live unto 
Him who liveth and w r as dead, and is alive for 
evermore. I would illustrate what I mean by 
saying that our Saviour's work, the work of 
which He said upon the cross, " It is finished," 
is like a perfect globe, complete in itself as one 
of the planets of our system, but we do not see 
what it is until the Spirit moves from point to 
point of the darkened disk, and all becomes lu- 
minous. When He, saith our Lord, the Spirit 
of Truth, is come, He shall take of mine, and 
show it unto you. Is there not something very 
remarkable in this saying and in the words that 
follow it, — " He shall not speak of Himself, he 
shall glorify Me " ? As the Son's work upon 
earth was to manifest His Father unto the world, 
as He spake not His own words nor followed 
out His own will, even so is the Blessed Spirit 
occupied only with the words and will of Him 
that sent Him. He speaks not of Himself, He 
has, as it were, no new thing to impart, but 
rather to make all things new, by setting the 
things of Heaven before the soul in that light 
of Heaven by which alone they can be read 
aright. 



140 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

** There is a spirit in man," a principle of life 
within us, wrapped like the fire within the flint, 
in sleep and darkness, until the powerful attrac- 
tion of God's blessed Spirit, " that inspiration 
of the Almighty which giveth understanding," 
comes to quicken it. For we must remember 
that in spiritual things every increase of knowl- 
edge, every expansion of love, partakes of the 
nature of a manifestation. It is $ discovery of 
Grod unto the soul to which it could never have 
attained through its own efforts. Spiritual illu- 
mination is the unsealing of the soul's eye, en- 
abling it to behold that which actually exists. 

" The lightning's flash did not create 
The lovely prospect it revealed, 
It only showed the real state 

Of what the darkness had concealed" 

Also must we guard against an idea which is 
apt to mix itself in our conceptions of God's 
dealings with man, — I mean that of looking 
upon them, whether general or individual, as 
being connected with some change in Him.* 
Known unto God are all His w r orks from the 

* It is not God, but Man, that is changed by our Saviour's 
death ; it is not necessary for our reparation that a change be 
wrought upon Him, but upon us, seeing that it is not God, but 
Man, that has lost His goodness. Christ came into the world, not 
to make God better, but to make us better; nor did he die to 
make Him more disposed to do good, but to dispose us to receive 
it. — Baxter. 



A PRESENT HE AVE X. 141 

foundation of the world. He loved the world 
before He made known that love in its crowning 
manifestation. What is the life and death of 
Jesus Christ but the showing, what is the Gos- 
pel but the telling, of this love ? — a love from 
the beginning yearning over its object, yet with- 
drawing from it as Joseph did from his brethren, 
— a love revealing itself at long intervals, in 
dark utterances, speaking to man through tho 
cloud and the fiery pillar, yet now showing us 
plainly of the Father in the intelligible language 
of a deed, — " Greater love than this hath no 
man, that a man lay down his life for his 
friends." 

So hath God loved the world, keeping back 
some better thing in store, reserving Love's 
final proof, its blest Epiphany, until the fulness 
of His own time came in ; even so He loves 
the soul before, through " loving-kindness," He 
so imparts that love as to enable the soul to 
return it. For until we have felt God to be 
loving, we cannot acknowledge Him to be love. 
St. John tells us explicitly, He that loveth not 
knoweth not God. The knowledge of God as 
described to us in Scripture is no cold, intel- 
lectual estimate of His perfections, but rather 
that intimate delighting in them, that power- 
fully felt attraction, which makes the very 



142 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

expressions of knowledge and love as applied 
to man's communion with his Maker inter- 
changeable. We often say of earthly things, 

" That we must love them ere we know 
That they are worthy to be loved." 

We may confess of many things and of many 
people that they are indeed lovely and desira- 
ble, but what are they to us until the heart has 
taught us at once our own need and their ex- 
ceeding worth and value ? 

And even thus, though after a manner un- 
recognizable to human sense, w r e need to be 
" drawn " to God. He whom no man hath 
seen, nor can see at any time, can only become 
the delight and desire of the soul, according to 
the degree in which He is pleased to reveal 
unto it His beauty, and impart unto it the sense 
of His satisfying goodness. We can only love 
God according to the measure in which we 
know and are known of Him. But is this 
measure a fixed one ? 

Surely, far otherwise ; yet it is no uncommon 
thing to hear well-disposed people lament their 
own conscious deadness and deficiency, in terms 
which imply that they look upon this holy 
affection rather in the light of a natural faculty, 
"which one person may be so happy as to possess 
and another be innocently devoid of, than as a 



A PRESENT HEAVE X. 143 

state of being to be attained to through the im- 
provement of a supernatural gift. Yet if fixed 
principles of attraction and repulsion are as 
unceasingly at work within God's spiritual 
kino-dom as within His natural world* — if 
there is a correspondency between the mani- 
festation of God's love and our " continuing " 
in what has been already imparted, it is evident 
that all who truly wish to love God better may 
do so. Our Saviour, that great master of 
Love's secrets, that Divine expounder of its 
Sentences, has not placed its essence, its ex- 
pression, in things to which man's feeble, op- 
pressed nature is not at all times equal ; in 
tears, in aspirations, in passionate outpourings 
of the spirit ; He has not sent us to the heaven 
of fervent rapture when we would bring Him 
down from above, neither to the Deep of an- 
guish and tribulation when we would raise Him 
once more from the dead in our cold, decaying 

* An analogy for what is here intended may be found in the 
causes which prevent vegetation in the desert. (See Humboldt's 
Asjwcts of Nature.) Vast sandy plains are dry because little rain 
falls upon them, and little rain falls upon them because they are so 
dry, columns of heated air rushing up to disperse the vapors that 
would otherwise descend. Because there is no moisture beneath, 
there is no rain from above. Often, doubtless, would God send. 
a gracious rain upon His inheritance and refresh it when it is 
weary, were not the clouds ready to break in fatness stayed by 
aridity below. 



144 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

hearts. But He has bid us keep within the 
way, the way within which " no wayfaring 
man " of humble and sincere heart " ever yet 
erred," grievously as his course might be beset 
and hindered. He has said, "If ye love me, ye 
will keep my commandments." We are surely 
too much in the habit of looking upon this espe- 
cial gift of God's Spirit, " this unction from the 
Holy One, through which we understand all 
things," as a mere affair of temperament, con- 
founding it with that, in which, as in a soil 
more or less favorable, it takes root, — the 
degree of religious receptivity, which varies so 
much in different individuals, even in different 
races of men. Yet spiritualized conceptions, 
fervid feelings, all which we include within the 
depth and range of susceptibility to devout im- 
pressions, are but the element through which 
the flame diffuses itself; did it consist in these, 
it would be a phosphorescence, lacking the hid- 
den principle of heat which makes it indeed " a 
fire," substantive and real as the object upon 
which it feeds. 

" To him that hath shall be given, and he 
shall have more abundantly." We have here a 
sure word of promise ; a prophecy fulfilling 
itself in the Christian life so constantly, so qui- 
etly, that its accomplishment cometh not with 



A PEESEXT HEAVEN. 145 

observation. Since our Lord, in taking our na- 
ture upon Himself, drew it back with Him into 
the bosom of His Father's love, there has arisen 
a bond between our common Humanity and 
God, even the bands of love, the cords of a 
man, which we as individuals may tighten or 
relax. You speak, in one of your letters, " of 
a self-regulation upon God's Law, which, in its 
co-operation with the purifying grace of His 
Spirit, is as the cleansing of the dust from the 
soul's windows, letting the sun's rays stream in 
and penetrate its remotest corners, — or like 
the deepening of the channel of a river by 
clearing away its stones and mud, which is fol- 
lowed by a fuller rush of waters."* St. Peter 
speaks plainly of the Holy Spirit as that which 
God hath given to those who obey Him,f and 
how many are the Scriptures which make us 
aware that there are, on our part, endeavors 
of which the Lord is mindful, attitudes to which 
He is ever favorable, mental characteristics, in 
themselves so pleasing to Him that He has said 
of the place where they are found, " Here will 
I dwell, for I have a delight therein." 

And hence there arises within the renewed 

* To this point tends the Prophet's admonition, " Sow in right- 
eousness, reap in mercy." 
f Acts v. 32. 

7 j 



146 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 



soul a secret, continual thirst, at once after holi- 
ness and after grace. "Let thy garments be 
always white, neither let thy head lack oint- 
ment." It covets earnestly these best gifts, 
these holy dispositions, both as marks of the 
Divine favor and improvable pledges of its 
countenance. For these jewels have an in- 
herent magnetism, attracting even while they 
adorn ; each fits the soul for that which it 
draws down upon it, a further communication 
of Divine Favor. In the Beatitudes we see 
this correspondency drawn out in strongly 
marked antithesis, but all Scripture witnesses 
to it, making us aware of a sure connection be- 
tween Faith and the putting forth of Almighty 
power ; between purity and the seeing of God ; 
meekness and the indwelling of His Spirit ; 
between the denying for conscience' sake of 
earthly desires, and the implanting of heavenly 
affections ; between the dedication of the heart 
to God, and the enlightenment of the mind by 
Him. 

And blessed is he who in any one of these, 
even in that which is least, has been found faith- 
ful to that which he has received of God ! For 
as with the gifts, so it is with the Giver who is 
to be desired above them all. In the soul that 
would receive Him there must be a preparedness, 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 147 

— an unwrought conformity to which the 
Psalmist confesses in inquiring, " When wilt 
thou come unto me ? I will walk in my house 
with a perfect heart." My times, he would 
say, are in Thy Hand ; I must wait for a season 
of refreshing, yet he waits in an outward 
obedience of which the life-pulse is an inner 
consciousness that the Lord is good to them 
that wait for Him, to the soul that diligently 
seeketh Him. 

" We wait, O Lord, for thy loving-kindness 
in the midst of thy temple." There is so much 
in the Gospel that peculiarly addresses itself to 
transgressors, that we are apt, in the attractive 
tenderness of its appeals to such as are ignorant 
and " out of the way," to lose sight of the fact 
that through its blessed revelations light has 
sprung up for the righteous, and joyful gladness 
for them that are true of heart. Thou meetest, 
saith the Prophet, him that rejoiceth and 
worketh righteousness, those that remember Tliee 
in their ways. And it is surely remarkable 
that the earliest manifestations of the conso- 
lation for which Israel waited were vouchsafed 
to " Israelites indeed." The first droppings of 
the shower of freenesses fell not upon the dwell- 
ers in the wilderness, but upon a field which 
the Lord had already blessed, upon just and 



148 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

devout persons walking in the ordinances of the 
Lord blameless, living up to the light which 
they then enjoyed. Such were Mary and 
Joseph, Zacharias and Elisabeth, Simpn and 
Anna the Prophetess ; such too in the Gentile 
world was he to whom the words whereby that 
world should be saved were first declared. The 
prayers and alms of the good Cornelius * had 
already come up as a memorial before God, and 

* In how many of these righteous persons was that question of 
the Prophet's answered, " Do not my words do good to him that 
walketh uprightly ? " Among these humble askers and seekers, 
flowing quietly along in the channel where they were to be over- 
taken by the waters of grace, the Eunuch of Queen Candace 
seems an affecting instance; and how much may we learn of 
God's attitude towards such righteous waiting souls, from the 
few words which the Spirit spake unto Philip, " Go and join thy- 
self to that chariot." Go and join thyself! There sat that hon- 
est, God-fearing, but still ignorant man, reading Esaias. The 
whole account is full of a heavenly poetry, — how he diligently 
read the passage, " He was led as a lamb to the slaughter " ; and 
then his question, showing such total darkness on the subject, 
" Of whom spake the Prophet this ; of himself, or of some other 
man? " — a simple, honest question, to which God sent the answer, 
and with it, His eternal salvation. Who knows how long the 
Ethiopian may have served the true God; he had come a long 
way to visit the Temple, the place where He dwelt. 

Have you ever seen your servants sitting down on a Sunday 
afternoon to read " a lesson," perhaps from a religious book which 
they do not understand, in perfect good faith that the lesson does 
them good? I feel a yearning over such, — a desire that they 
should possess the unknown good they ignorantly hope for, — as 
St. Paul declared to the Athenians the unknown God whom they 
ignorantly worshipped. — J. E. B. 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 149 

in the joy of those glad tidings which reached 
him, that unto the Gentiles also was granted 
repentance unto life, was mixed a peculiar per- 
sonal encouragement, like that w T hich was of old 
extended to one greatly beloved. " Fear not," 
said the angel commissioned to impart so many 
wonders unto Daniel, " for from the first day 
that thou didst set thy heart to understand and 
to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words 
were heard, and I am come for thy words" 

And even now, though it be no longer sent 
to us by the hand of saint or angel, the keeping 
of the commandment hath great reward. Many 
anxious and honest Christians may be yet con- 
sciously far from the' spiritual haven where they 
would be. Let such be consoled in remember- 
ing that the Father who draws us unto Christ 
beholds us, yea, sets forth to meet us " while 
we are yet a great way off." A great way off, 
and yet upon the way, — herein lies all the 
difference between resistance and returning, be- 
tween the temper to which God inclines and 
that against which He fights w T ith the sword of 
His mouth. We may be far as yet from the 
robe and ring, from the kiss of perfect recon- 
ciliation, still farther from the hearing of that 
saying, " Son, thou art ever with me, and all that 
I have is thine" yet we may be in the way that 



150 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

leadeth to a kingdom. Of this, we can have 
no more affecting instance than the case of the 
Disciples. How much they loved their Lord, 
how little they understood Him ! They seem, 
like the multitudes who marvelled at the gra- 
cious words that came out of His mouth, to have 
felt an attraction towards His teaching, without 
perceiving its true import ; for how little while 
their Lord was with them do they appear to 
have caught of His Spirit, or to have become 
aware of the nature of His appointed work ! 
This is shown in so many parts of the sacred 
story, that it would be but tedious to multiply 
instances to prove that it was upon a kingdom 
of this world, and the power and glory belong- 
ing to such, that their desires were set, their 
requests founded, — desires yet to be fulfilled, 
requests, yet to be granted far more fully than 
they were then capable of realizing. " Ye shall 
indeed drink of my cup." Their faith, though 
imperfect in its scope, was sincere in its nature, 
and it did not lose its reward. They trusted 
that it was He who should redeem Israel, and 
having an eye to Him, they were lightened, 
and their faces were not ashamed. 

And so will it be with us. They who, con- 
tinuing faithful to Divine Grace, however par- 
tially communicated, serve God with their whole 



A PRESENT HEAVEN. 151 

lives, will never fail of that one reward, the 
greatest which even He has to bestow, the be- 
ing made able to love Him with their whole 
hearts. If we follow our Lord's footsteps hum- 
bly and patiently along the common road, He 
will take us, as He did the three favored 
Disciples, with Him upon the Mount, and show 
us Moses and Elias, the hard sayings of the 
law, the deep enigmatical oracles of life, trans- 
figured in Himself. Our eyes will be no more 
hold en, and the exclamation of our souls will 
be, " Hast Thou been so long time with me, 
Lord, and I have not known Thee ? " 

Do you remember Bunyan's quaint and beau- 
tiful description of the Land of Beulah, a coun- 
try situated on this side of the River of Death, 
where the sun shineth night and day, and where 
Pilgrims may rest and rejoice safely, their King 
having brought them to His Banqueting House, 
where His banner over them is love ? The 
heart, as it advances in Christ, seems to reach 
out towards this inward Millennium, this Messi- 
anic reign of rest and fulness, the kiss of right- 
eousness and peace within the soul. It wearies 
of that order of things in which there is a con- 
tinual effort, — a struggle, a Law in the mem- 
bers warring against the Law of God, and 
desires to escape from it into the freedom* to 

* See Note M. 



152 A PRESENT HE A VEN. 

which Christ has called us, the state in which 
this law is no more coercive, having become the 
law of these very members, the principle by which 
they naturally act. A state whose characteristic 
is not Law, but the liberty which exists under 
such a law as that, which " being perfect " is 
endued with power to " convert " the soul. 

And if we pass but slowly into this liberty, 
if, as you say, some of those who we may hope 
arrive at the Holy City in safety seem to miss 
the Land of Beulah on their way, — to know 
much of the conflicts and struggles incident to 
our Christian calling, little of its rest and sat- 
isfaction, — this need scarcely be wondered at, 
"for there are many adversaries." The prin- 
ciple of Life within us has much to contend 
with from inward and outward hinderance, — 
the imperishable seed lives in many a spiritual 
conception, many a heavenly disposition that is 
not yet strong enough to detach itself from 
earthly obstructions, so that, lifted into a re- 
gion where it feels the sunshine of love upon 
its leaves, it bursts into flower and fragrance. 
Yet, while we were yet without strength, Christ 
died for the ungodly. Decay, infirmity, cir- 
cumstance, all that under which we do and 
must groan, being burdened, — what matter if 
these overcome us, so that we overcome them 
through Him who loveth us. " A troop shall 



A PRESENT HEAVEN 153 

overcome Him," it was spoken of Gael, u but 
He shall overcome at the last." Much bloom, 
much sweetness, much usefulness, may be tram- 
pled out of our hearts and lives, without any- 
moral cession, — this alone can separate us from 
the love of Christ ; comforted or uncomforted, 
so long as our hearts, our wills, are steadfast, we 
can still be His sad, true lovers. The blossom 
of early hope falls off, the fruit of performance 
does not ripen perfectly ; it is the green initial, 
the will, that which we would fain be, which 
Christ looks for, and, coming, desires to find. 

Of many a rooted and grounded soul the 
bloom-time lies possibly beyond the grave. Yet 
the Believer must be ever solicitous of victory ; * 
— ever desirous to ivin, f to hold his ground in 
a humble way, to let the enemy gain no advan- 
tage. We should love, we should ardently 
aspire to, the lowly, sorrowful triumphs of 
Christ, the calm persistence in known duties, 

* " It was spiritual death which Christ conquered, so that at 
the last it shall be swallowed up, — mark the word, — not in life, 
but in victory. As the dead body shall be raised to life, so also 
shall the defeated soul to victory, if only it has been fighting on 
its Master's side, has made no covenant with death, nor itself bowed 
its forehead to its seal. Blind from the prison-house, maimed 
from the battle, or mad from the tombs, their souls shall surely 
yet sit astonished at His feet who giveth peace." — Ruskin. 

f Often, says De Maistre, in a real battle, the losses on either 
side seem equal. Who does win? He who keeps possession of the 

JUid. 

7* 



154 A PRESENT HEAVEN. 

the readiness to begin all over again, — to see 
the cherished plan, even the cherished prayer, 
defeated. Death, the death of hope, of endeav- 
or, will yet be swallowed up in victory ; — 

" Thy dead men shall live, 
With my dead body shall they arise." 

Christ's final Triumph is secure, and with Him 
the triumph of all that has been indeed His. 
When St. Paul predicts that Christ shall reign 
until He have subdued all things under His feet, 
He adds emphatically, " Now the last enemy 
that shall be destroyed is Death." It is impos- 
sible that these words should be spoken of nat- 
ural dissolution only. They refer to the whole 
of that dark empire of which the death of the 
body is but a part, and of this as a whole Christ 
is the conqueror. Behold, let us therefore go 
to Him that we may also die with Him ; let us 
die with Him, that we may also live with Him ; 
let us suffer with Him, that we may also reign 
with Him ; let us not in word, in thought, in life, 
deny Him who abideth faithful, who cannot deny 
Himself. 

" And on His Head were many crowns. 
"And He was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood; 
"And the armies which were in Heaven followed Him, — 
clothed in fine linen, white and clean." 






r 



Notes. 



o5MX3o 



Notes 




Note A. — Page 13. 

S AY we not say that the Gospel — the 
simplest sense of a word being always its 
truest one — is considered and preached 
W^, i^ 3 too little in its primary meaning, " glad 
tidings"? The characteristic office of an evangelist, 
as distinguished from that of a teacher, is that of a 
herald or proclaimer. He is one who bringeth good 
tidings. In classical language (see Olshausen, Vol. I. 
p. 3) the word Evangelium was also used to signify 
a reward or present given to a person bringing a 
piece of good news, making him a sharer in the 
gladness he imparted. Thus, while the Gospel, like 
Him of whom it testifies, places its work before it, it 
also brings its reward with it (Isa. xl. 10, and lxii. 
11), being its own and exceeding great reward. The 
Gospel is a gift, — one of those which our Lord, 
having ascended up on high, received for us men, — 
an acquisition, a blessing making rich, a thing to be 



158 NOTES. 



rejoiced over, — good news, in short, and to be wel- 
comed as such, and not good advice only. See on this 
subject a beautiful tract, " The Ship of Heaven." 






Note B. — Page 16. 

WE may apply to Faith what St. Augustine 
says of its companion: — "Is love made 
perfect the moment it is born ? so far from it, it is 
born in order that it may be brought to perfection. 
"When it has been born, it is nourished ; when it has 
been nourished, it is strengthened ; when it has been 
strengthened, it is made perfect. When it has ar- 
rived at perfection, it says, c I desire to depart and to 
be with Christ/ " 



Note C. — Page 35. 

" TVTOWj without Faith we cannot be saved, for 
JL II we cannot rightly serve God unless we love 
Him, and we cannot love Him unless we know Him, 
neither can we know God unless by Faith. There- 
fore, salvation by Faith is only, in other words, the 
love of God by the knowledge of God, or the recovery 
of the image of God by a true spiritual acquaintance 
with Him. 

" Would you then be freed from the bondage of 



NOTES. 159 

corruption? would you grow in grace, in grace in 
general, or in any grace in particular ? If you would, 
your way is plain. Ask from God more faith; beg 
of Him, morning, noon, and night, while you walk 
by the way, while you sit in the house, when you lie 
down, and when you rise up, — beg of Him simply 
to impress Divine things more deeply on your heart, 
— to give you more and more of the substance of 
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." — 
John Wesley. 



Note D. — Page 43. 

AN idea, according to the vigor with which it is 
conceived or realized, will quickly or slowly 
prepare for itself a body, and pass into a fact. When 
once it has established its empire within the mind, it 
will not be long in bringing outward things under its 
jurisdiction. 

" J'entends, par la foi, cette confiance dans la verite* 
qui fait que non seulement on la tient pour vrai, et 
que Tintelligence en est satisfaite ; mais qu'on a con- 
fiance dans son droit de regner sur le monde, de 
gouverner les faits, et dans sa puissance pour y 
reussir. 

" C'est dans ce sentiment qu'une fois entre en pos- 
session de la verite, l'homme se sent appele a la faire 
passer dans les faits exterieurs, k les reformer, h les 
r^gler selon la raison." — Guizot. 



160 NOTES. 



Note E. — Pages 51, 57. 

" T^ ELIGION stands upon two pillars, namely 

JLV what Christ did for us in His flesh, and what 

He performs in us by His Spirit. Most errors arise 

from an attempt to separate these two." — Newton. 



Note F. — Page 67. 

WE may learn something by considering the 
sense in which the Apostles use the word 
Saint ; as when St. Paul addressed a whole Church, 
" Even all that be at Rome," as having received 
grace and apostleship, called to be Saints ; and thus 
opens another epistle, " To the Church of God which 
is at Corinth, called to be Saints, with all who in 
every place call upon the Lord Jesus, both theirs and 
ours." The word as they employ it confers no pecu- 
liar distinction ; it is not, as it has become with us, a 
Title of Honor, but the badge of simple citizenship in 
Christ, being applied to all who remain faithful to the 
spiritual relations in which they have been placed by 
Him. 

It is a Family Name, not acquired, but inherited, 
and as such testifies, not to eminence of personal 
grace, or loftiness of individual achievement, but to 
union with the Holiness of which they who bear it 
have been made partakers. To be a Saint, in the 



NOTES. 161 

sense in which they use the word, is to be, not such 
a one as some Christian men and women raised 
up by God for especial ends have been, but such a 
one as all Christian men and women may be. To be 
a Saint is simply to be a man in Christ ; it is the 
growing up unto Him who is our Head in all things, 
it is the feeding upon the Bread which came down 
from Heaven, through privileges which are open, and 
through duties which are common to all. 

When we restrict the idea of Saintship to those 
eminent spirits, the burning and shining lights in 
which we are permitted from time to time to rejoice, 
we betray that our notion of sanctity is placed rather 
in things accidental to the renewed character, than in 
that which is its essence. Zeal, fervor, learning, 
and eloquence devoted to the holiest purposes; the 
power of subjecting men's spirits, or of calling down 
upon them the refreshing from above, — these things 
do not make the Saint, they only adorn him. These 
are but the gifts laid upon the altar. "It is the 
altar which sanctifies the gift," and of that altar all 
are partakers. 

To recognize the privileges of our high yet com- 
mon calling is to understand that a man is not a 
Saint in virtue of anything which separates him from 
his Brethren, — which throws him as it were into 
relief from the general household of faith, — but 
through that which unites him to them all. And 
when I think of this, I feel that our present need is 
not so much of the signs of an Apostle, wrought 

x 



162 NOTES, 

among us in signs and wonders, in mighty and merci- 
ful deeds, as of a more general partaking in those 
covenanted blessings, given under the usual economy 
of grace, to every man to profit withal. We may be 
able to number few men of mark and feature, we 
have among us but " few names." Yet need we go 
round our Zion, counting up her towers and telling 
over her spiritual bulwarks ? It is enough for us, 
looking to her sure foundation, to be able to say that 
" This man was born in her " ; sufficient to know that 
the Highest doth even now inhabit her. The times 
and the seasons are in God's hands; for aught we 
know, it may not fall within his plan that individual 
gifts should be as conspicuous as in earlier ages ; dif- 
fusion of light may in some degree interfere with its 
concentration, and will at any rate cause it to appear 
less splendid. There are peculiar manifestations, even 
as the Apostle tells us, but one Lord ; diversities of 
gifts, worthy of being coveted earnestly, yet one in- 
clusive of them all, the living membership in Christ, 
in which his people, whatever they may keep or lose, 
have still all things in common. 



Note G. — Page 86. 

ST. PAUL speaks of being able to comfort such 
of his converts as were in trouble, with the com- 
fort wherewith he himself was comforted of God 



NOTES. 163 

Wlio can impart anything that he has not first re- 
ceived? And where are the souls that have such 
especial need of being established in the everlasting 
consolations of God, as those " sons of consolation," 
the Levites of the better covenant, who are con- 
tinually called upon to administer it to others ? As 
the Apostles spoke of themselves as "witnesses," 
chosen before of God, to declare among the people 
the things which they had heard and seen, so should 
their successors, called with a like holy calling unto 
a like holy office and ministry, be able to speak of 
the things concerning the kingdom of God, as of that 
which they do know, and to testify of them as of that 
which they have seen. The spiritual husbandman, 
laboring in his Lord's vineyard, must be first a par- 
taker of its fruits (2 Tim. ii. 6), and should be able 
to speak of the good country where they grow as of a 
land with which he is familiar. The Gospel of salva- 
tion should not fall from his lips like an historic nar- 
rative, — it is not a book which he is reading, but a 
story which he is relating out of the intimacy of per- 
sonal experience. " We are his witnesses in these 
things." " come hither," says the Psalmist, " and 
I will tell you what God hath done for my soul." — 
See on this subject two tracts published at Leeds, 
1854 : " Authorities for the Certainty of Grace," by 
the Rev. R. Collins ; and " Renewal or Conversion," 
by the Rev. R. Aitkin. 



164 NOTES. 



Note H. — Page 102. 

" f I A HE Spirit of God yet causes men to hope 
X that a world will come; the better one, 
they call it, perhaps they might more wisely call 
it the real one. Also I hear them speak continually 
of going to it, rather than of its coming to them, 
which again is strange ; for in that prayer which 
they had straight from the lips of the Life of the 
world, there is not anything about going to another 
world, — only something of another world coming 
into this, or rather not another, but the only govern- 
ment, that government which will constitute a World 
indeed, new heavens and a new earth. Earth no 
more without form and void, but sown with fruits of 
righteousness ; Firmament no more of passing cloud, 
but of cloud risen out of the crystal sea ; cloud in 
which, as He was once received up, so He shall again 
come with power." — Ruskin. 



Note I. — Page 128, 



o^ 



ST. PAUL saith, " The spirit will give itself up 
to God, and trust in Him and obey, but reason, 
flesh and blood, will resist, and cannot upward rise." 
Therefore must our Lord God bear with us. One 
person asked, " Wherefore doth not God impart full 
knowledge ? " Dr. Martin replied, " If any one 



NOTES. 165 

could indeed believe, then for very joy he would be 
able neither to eat nor drink, nor do aught else." — 
Life of Luther. 



Note K — Page 134. 

WE must not insist upon any routine in re- 
ligious experience, as the spiritual disci- 
pline to which believers are subjected varies with the 
probation of outward life. To the sinful and ignorant 
the awakening to God is as the coming in of light, 
making them to see their ways and to loathe them- 
selves for their doings which were not good ; to 
others, already in the way, it is the discovery of 
love, Thou meetest him that worketh righteousness, 
those that remember thee in thy ways. 

The work of the Holy Spirit includes both teach- 
ing and training; it has not only to enlighten the 
intellect to apprehend Divine truth, but also to guide 
the heart into its ways. Some believers seem from 
the first taught of God to look to the work of Christ ; 
a deep conviction of sinfulness, a sense of impending 
danger, draw them to Him as to a Saviour. Having 
been filled with their own ways, and having tasted of 
the bitterness they led to, they experience deep sor- 
row, and with it that peculiar joy of the pardoned 
soul, unlike, as you say, to any other, in its union of 
deep sorrow with grateful love and joy. To such 
spirits the work of their Lord is precious, they 



166 NOTES. 

feel their need of it at every step, yet they have 
still a training, sometimes a very severe one, to go 
through, — a will to be subdued, affections to be 
purified. To others, the discipline comes first, they 
are drawn to our Lord through a yearning after 
moral perfection, which leads them to seek the ex- 
cellency which shines nowhere so brightly as in Him. 
They seek Him in ordinances, through duties. He is 
for them, perhaps for a long time, a Prince rather 
than a Saviour, yet all the while the Will of God is 
instructing them in the doctrine. Though at this 
stage they are little able to be the guides and com- 
forters of others, their own feet stand firm, and when 
a clearer light dawns, it finds them upon the path on 
which, like early travellers, they have set forth be- 
fore the breaking of the day, — the path on which no 
true wayfarer, though he might walk on it long in 
darkness, ever yet erred. We may compare the 
hearts of these just persons to a fair, well-ordered 
room, with the fire on the hearth laid ready for kin- 
dling. We are conscious of a dullness in the at- 
mosphere, for the Master has not yet come, but all is 
prepared for Him, and for the touch of the living 
coal that will light up all into a steadfast glow. 



NOTES. 167 



Note L. — Page 138. 

A REAL though not as yet a complete change ; 
one which may be illustrated through that 
which in the Persian fable passes over the clay 
which the rose has permeated. It has gained a real 
sweetness, though independent of its fragrant com- 
panion it would be, what in a certain sense it even 
now remains, " a miserable piece of clay." 

" Christ," says Baxter, " is not such a physician 
as to perform but a supposed or reputative cure. 
He came not to persuade His Father to judge us to be 
well because He himself is well, or to leave us uncured, 
persuading God that we are cured. Never did the 
blessed Son of God intend in His dying or merits to 
change the Holy Nature of His Father, and to cause 
Him to love that which is unlovely, or to reconcile 
Him to that which, as He is God, He abhorreth. We 
must bear His image, and be holy as He is holy, be- 
fore He can approve us or love us with complacency. 
This is the work of our Blessed Redeemer, to make 
man fit for God's approbation and delight. He re- 
generateth us that He may sanctify us and fit us for 
our Master's use." 

Children talk of repeating things by heart. Is 
there not such a thing as living by heart ? " Ye shall 
know the truth," saith Christ, " and the truth shall 
make you free." Obedience, long persevered in, will 
grow less and less conscious, and Christ will become, 



168 NOTES. 

in a simple and literal sense, the life of them that be- 
lieve. This state is so far assimilated to that of 
Heaven, that its guiding principle is in a less degree 
faith than love, a confidence less founded upon that 
which is still unseen, than built up upon that which is 
known and loved. A state, in which the souTs con- 
verse is not framed like a speech acquired by rules 
and study, but is idiomatic, the natural expression of 
natural feelings. Yet even this has been acquired. 
As in the fine arts, we must work by rule until we 
are able to work without it. May not a habit of the 
soul be formed, as well as a habit of the eye or hand, 
when the outward rule has passed into an inward 
law, working out in that soul an obedience " so uni- 
versal, so subtle, and so glorious, that nothing but the 
heart can keep it." * The true artist is not thinking 
(consciously) of his rules, yet keeps them all. Is 
there not a state corresponding to this in spiritual 
life, one in which wisdom reveals herself to such of 
her true lovers as have sought her from " the flower 
to the grape ?•" — when her glorious classics, first 
learnt, as at school, as a hard and distasteful lesson, 
studied faithfully, but as a task — often, perhaps, 
wept over — are taken up, not by constraint, but 
willingly, their difficulties explained, their beauties 
appreciated, as a bosom-book, "guide, companion, 
and familiar friend." 

* Buskin. 



NOTES. 169 



Note M. — Page 151. 



SPIRITUAL freedom is not founded upon law- 
lessness, but upon obedience, as St. Bernard 
says, to a better will than our own ; it is not freedom 
from law, but freedom from that within ourselves 
which makes it felt as a constraint, — the rejoicing 
freedom which loves the authority it lives under. 
There seems much profit in considering the nature 
of true spiritual recreation, little in endeavoring to 
trace out its attainable degree. Some pious thinkers 
have fixed this at a limit which, although it may not 
want the support of an isolated passage of Scripture, 
is opposed to its general tenor, and also contradictory 
to a deep-seated instinct which assures us that per- 
fection, if here attainable, would involve a latent 
imperfection from which the soul shrinks. Under 
our present conditions of being, we feel that we need 
that sense of dependence upon God which a con- 
sciousness of frailty inspires ; where without this 
would be the adoring humility, the tender, implicit 
reliance upon a better righteousness than our own ? 
The perfection of which our nature is capable is not 
that of a state complete in itself, wrought out and 
established within the soul at once and forever. 
The very life of the renewed soul is relative ; its 
beauty and strength derived. 

" Thou sowest not yet that thing which shall be, but 
bare grain, ,, a seed with which the Divine Husband- 
8 



170 NOTES. 

man has long patience, but whose growth both to the 
anxious and the scornful eye seems tardy, thin, and 
too often blighted with the east wind. Christ is con- 
tent to be for a while in the world and in the heart 
the smallest of seeds, content to be a grain of corn, 
which, falling into the dry and long-drawn furrow, 
upon the beaten path, the wind-swept common, lives, 
but often as " dying." He who was Himself rejected 
seems to be satisfied with that which man despises. 
Man asks for that which is absolute ; limited results, 
partial triumphs, do not satisfy him. Hence we find 
the unbeliever demanding what the Christian desires, 
and refusing to believe in any change, unless that 
change be thorough, and so to speak magical. 

" Our position is briefly this," says a writer in the 
Westminster Review (January, 1852). " We believe 
in intellectual conversion, and, to a certain extent, in 
gradual modification of the moral nature ; but it is in 
defiance of all sound psychology to believe in a sud- 
den moral conversion following upon an intellectual 
conversion. Once let a man arrive at maturity with 
any distinctive character, and it is idle to think that 
he will change it. Physiology will teach us that it 
is impossible. Sorrow turning his thoughts inwards ; 
or calamity shattering his pride and confidence, may 
effect great changes in the outward manifestations, 
but they will not alter the inward nature. They 
may make the irreligious soul fanatical, they will 
not make it religious; they may make pride ape 
humility, they will not make the spirit humble. 






NOTES. 171 

There may be repentance, there may be sorrowing, 
remorse, but there cannot be change. (?) We may 
make vows in anguish over remembered sins, and 
keep our vows as far as regard overt acts, but the 
nature which originally moved us along the path of 
crime remains unchangeable^ unchanged. The no- 
torious sinner metamorphosed into a saint is only a 
change of attitude ', not a change of being. A man 
may change his convictions, his views, his deepest 
and most settled opinions, but he cannot change his 
temperament, his passions, his moral nature. Intel- 
lectual conversion is not co-extensive with and coer- 
cive of moral conversion, the organic qualities of the 
mind (of which certain tempers are the outward 
manifestations) cannot be constituted anew." 

Yet a man who has experienced sorrow and re- 
pentance, whose views, convictions, deepest and most 
settled opinions, are altered, is surely a changed man, 
however far from being a perfect one. Opinions like 
the foregoing seem founded upon ignorance of the 
field in which Divine grace works, the will of man ; 
conversion is not a change of nature, but a change of 
will, of aim, and affection. Christians, as well as un- 
believers, need Neander's warning to beware " of 
that lifeless supernaturalism which views all Divine 
communications rather as overlying the mind than as 
incorporating themselves with its natural psycho- 
logical development," — we must consider them, ac- 
cording to our Lord's figure, as seed growing with 
the mind, and also suffering with it from checks and 
bligh 



172 



NOTES. 



"In Jesus Christ," he says, "the actual and the 

ideal meet truly." He is all that He means, all that 

He claims to be ; but it is far otherwise with His fol 

lowers, in whom the fact falls short, the outline 

is ever incompletely filled. Christianity 

in the world conforms to the conditions 

that limit Humanity, humbling 

itself, even as Christ did, 

in being found in 

fashion as a 

man. 




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